The FBI And DOJ Are Investigating ByteDance's Use Of TikTok To Spy On Journalists (forbes.com) 35
The FBI and the Department of Justice are investigating the events that led TikTok's Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to use the app to surveil American journalists, including this reporter, Forbes reported, citing sources familiar with the departments' actions. From the report: According to a source in position to know, the DOJ Criminal Division, Fraud Section, working alongside the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, has subpoenaed information from ByteDance regarding efforts by its employees to access U.S. journalists' location information or other private user data using the TikTok app. According to two sources, the FBI has been conducting interviews related to the surveillance. ByteDance's use of the app to surveil U.S. citizens was first reported by Forbes in October, and confirmed by an internal company investigation in December.
"We have strongly condemned the actions of the individuals found to have been involved, and they are no longer employed at ByteDance. Our internal investigation is still ongoing, and we will cooperate with any official investigations when brought to us," said ByteDance spokesperson Jennifer Banks. This is the first report of the federal government investigating ByteDance's surveillance practices. It is not clear if the DOJ's subpoena is connected to the FBI's interviews. The DOJ and the FBI are both part of the interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which this week demanded that ByteDance divest from TikTok or face a nationwide ban of the app. For the past several years, CFIUS has attempted to negotiate a national security contract with TikTok meant to mitigate concerns that it could be used by the Chinese government to access valuable private information about U.S. citizens or manipulate U.S. civic discourse.
"We have strongly condemned the actions of the individuals found to have been involved, and they are no longer employed at ByteDance. Our internal investigation is still ongoing, and we will cooperate with any official investigations when brought to us," said ByteDance spokesperson Jennifer Banks. This is the first report of the federal government investigating ByteDance's surveillance practices. It is not clear if the DOJ's subpoena is connected to the FBI's interviews. The DOJ and the FBI are both part of the interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which this week demanded that ByteDance divest from TikTok or face a nationwide ban of the app. For the past several years, CFIUS has attempted to negotiate a national security contract with TikTok meant to mitigate concerns that it could be used by the Chinese government to access valuable private information about U.S. citizens or manipulate U.S. civic discourse.
Yawn (Score:1, Troll)
Re: (Score:2)
One group being bad doesn't mean the other group isn't being bad.
Your condemnation of the FBI is fair, but that doesn't exonerate ByteDance. (Of course, they haven't been proven guilty, but there's substantial circumstantial evidence that's public knowledge.)
Gee... (Score:3)
who coulda guessed.
Did they investigate facebook? (Score:2, Informative)
Or has facebook really been leaking information to the FBI as nypost states.
https://nypost.com/2022/09/14/... [nypost.com]
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Or has facebook really been leaking information to the FBI as nypost states.
Or how about Fox News.
I can't think of anybody who "manipulates U.S. civic discourse" than Fox News.
Re:Did they investigate facebook? (Score:4, Informative)
> I can't think of anybody who "manipulates U.S. civic discourse" [sic] than Fox News.
What do you think of these?:
https://www.newsguardtech.com/... [newsguardtech.com]
https://www.newsguardtech.com/... [newsguardtech.com]
Both "less than" and "more than" would be a problem.
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I'm reminded of this XKCD [xkcd.com]. MSNBC may have earned a worse rating, but Fox has done more damage. I don't know how many times I've had to argue with folks who truly believed Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill only extended through 3rd grade. It turns out, that's how Fox reported it [foxnews.com]. From the article:
The bill, officially named Parental Rights in Education, bans school employees or third parties from giving classroom instruction on "sexual orientation" or "gender identity" in kindergarten through third grade.
Lying by omission. Here's the actual relevant text of the bill [myfloridahouse.gov], which is not in the Fox article:
3. Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.
This, my friends, is what the media manipulating political discourse truly looks like. People are forming their opi
Re: Did they investigate facebook? (Score:2)
Mod up
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USDOJ: It's fine when we do it!
Pretty much. While I'm sure the Chinese are spying on us, my own government, and its various alphabet agencies, are far more of a threat to my liberties than any foreign agency.
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Us as individuals or us as a collective pronoun. You get different answers.
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USDOJ: It's fine when we do it!
Pretty much. While I'm sure the Chinese are spying on us, my own government, and its various alphabet agencies, are far more of a threat to my liberties than any foreign agency.
I'm not so worried about my direct personal liberties because I'm sufficiently insignificant on so many levels. This is true for privacy intrusions by both the US and Chinese governments.
However, I do worry about national security concerns a bit. I worry more about industrial espionage because that potentially affects my company, economy, and income. I worry a bit about impacts on a free press, free speech, and other human rights.
Again, none of these issues (where either the US or China are to blame) dir
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That article gets one key thing though, if law enforcement asks for the information and Facebook turns it over then no 1A was violated because you are putting that data on Facebook's servers. As far as I know (and someone can correct me) there is no explicit protection that says Facebook has to turn down all requests.
Now Facebook is within it's rights to say "fuck off, come back with a subpoena" and then the FBI or whomever can go that route, but if the FBI says "can we have this please" Facebook can say "
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Considering the NYPost is a tabloid, I'd use Weekly World News as a backup source. Just what has Bat Boy been up to all these years?
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It's politics, but I'm not sure it's theater. It was enough that ByteDance tried to separate from it's owners and was turned down. (I think the story was on Slashdot within the last week.) And several European governments have taken steps to reduce the influence of TicTok, so it's not JUST the US.
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I prefer "handing" data to the feds.
(Facebook denied being part of PRISM [venturebeat.com] before requesting to be allowed to notify users of PRISM data requests [dailydot.com], a request which was of course denied — but which settles the debate as to whether it is occurring.)
However, that's not material to the question of whether TikTok should be used by China to manipulate our society.
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However, that's not material to the question of whether TikTok should be used by China to manipulate our society.
Although their "manipulation" is really no different than what Twitter does. If I post something on Twitter, nobody fucking sees it. Somewhere in the void there's an algorithm which has determined that what I write doesn't meet the criteria of being widely disseminated on their platform. Probably because I don't have enough followers, or fail to meet some other behind-the-scenes metric(s). Twitter amplifies certain voices and silences others, the same as TikTok.
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Almost nobody sees my tweets either, because almost nobody is following me... except when I reply early to a tweet left by someone a lot of people are following me. The most-viewed tweet in my top tweets has 5,361 impressions, but only 142 engagements. My tweets with the highest engagement rates have only dozens of interacts, so not very many views at all.
Twitter will never show your tweets to many people unless they have a lot of interacts, and that will never happen until lots of people follow you. And if
What a joke. (Score:1)
Atlantic Council (Score:2)
Did they notice that a bunch of people left NATO [rokfin.com] jobs and then started working at Bytedance when the last controversy under Trump/Oracle happened?
Looking in the wrong place (Score:3)
What they should be looking at and what we should all be looking at is the fact that through TikTok, the Chinese government can influence people elsewhere in the world by making some content falsely appear to be super important and other content gets derated and thus not shown. It's not unlike the old Twitter.
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Well, yes, but on that level TikTok is small fry. Facebook, Google, many press empires, ...
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other content gets derated and thus not shown. It's not unlike the old Twitter.
It's not unlike the new Twitter, either. That's why Twitter made changes to trending right after December 16, when #QElon was trending "along with #ElonTheSnowflake" and "#MuskMeltdown".
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by making some content falsely appear to be super important and other content gets derated and thus not shown.
If you get all your news from one source, you'll discover that's the case even with American media (social or otherwise) companies. Plus, our media frequently controls the narrative when they lie by omission. As an example, if you thought Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill only extended through 3rd grade, you were lied to by the media, as a manipulation tactic to make the bill appear more palatable.
FBI Should Recuse Itself (Score:2, Informative)