Cocaine Mitch may be onto something. Last week, the senator called on his colleagues to pass a bill banning TikTok unless it is sold by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. Now ex-TikTok employees are coming forward with stories detailing the company’s entanglement with China.
According to eleven former employees interviewed by Fortune, TikTok has deep ties to Beijing through ByteDance which the company has tried to conceal. Some of the employees were with the company as late as last year, after the launch of Project Texas, a $1.5 billion initiative to store data of American citizens in the US.
Evan Turner, a former senior data scientist at TikTok, worked for a Beijing executive during his time at the company. After Project Texas, Turner was told he would report to a Seattle-based manager. This never happened, however — and Turner continued to meet regularly with the Beijing executive over video conference calls. Every two weeks. Turner emailed spreadsheets filled with data on hundreds of thousands of US users to ByteDance workers in Beijing.
“I literally worked on a project that gave US data to China,” Turner said. “They were completely complicit in that. There were Americans that were working in upper management that were completely complicit in this.” Cockburn would like to remind Turner that he was also complicit in the scheme.
Other ex-employees raised concerns over TikTok’s internal messaging system, Lark, which is shared with ByteDance. One employee, who worked in business development at both TikTok and ByteDance, said she lost several deals selling Lark because neither company would give her a firm answer where they stored data. According to a New York Times report, personal information, including users’ driver’s license details, was available on Lark channels.
Cockburn hastens to point out that several of the employees interviewed by Fortune were fired by TikTok. Some have filed complaints against the company related to their treatment as employees and may not be the most unbiased sources. But is ByteDance still probably spying on Americans? In all likelihood, yes.
A TikTok post on X fired back at the claims made in the article, saying that since January 2023, the data of American users has been isolated and overseen by the USDS.
“If this reporter had done any research into what actually occurs at TikTok, she would know that the scenarios laid out are not only forbidden by policy, but are also subject to controls in place that prevent data sharing,” the post read.
The bill to ban TikTok or force its sale is still stalled in the Senate, but McConnell may be one step closer to his dream. On Sunday, Democratic senator and chair of the Senate Commerce Committee Maria Cantwell said she wants to end China’s control of TikTok and push the vote on the bill “sooner as opposed to later.”
