Chinese tech giant ByteDance, owners of the contentious social media platform TikTok, fired four employees for accessing data of at least two US-based journalists.
This comes right before the US House of Representatives was due to vote on a $1.66 trillion omnibus spending bill, a part of which is to ban use and download of TikTok on any devices used by a US Federal employee.
AFP, after getting access to an email from ByteDance’s general counsel Erich Andersen, reported that several staffers accessed data of two journalists as part of an internal probe into leaks of company information to the media.
In a statement to the news agency, ByteDance said it condemned the “misguided initiative that seriously violated the company’s Code of Conduct.”
According to the New York Times, the targeted reporters were Emily Baker-White, who wrote for BuzzFeed and is now at Forbes, and Cristina Criddle of the Financial Times. However, Forbes had reported that two more of its reporters, who are also former BuzzFeed reporters, were targeted.
A company review found out that the four employees had obtained the IP addresses of the journalists in a bid to determine whether they were in the same location as any of the ByteDance colleagues suspected of disclosing confidential information.
In a mail to employees, ByteDance chief executive, Rubo Liang wrote: “I was deeply disappointed when I was notified of the situation … and I’m sure you feel the same. The public trust that we have spent huge efforts building is going to be significantly undermined by the misconduct of a few individuals.”
Two of those employees were working in China and two were in the US. ByteDance said it had restructured its internal audit and risk team and had removed any access to US data from that department.
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