March 23, 2023 Updated: March 23, 2023
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew
testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the Rayburn House
Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, on March 23, 2023. (Chip
Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The CEO of TikTok claims
that efforts by its China-based parent company to stalk American journalists do
not qualify as “surveillance” or “spying.”
The comments referred to
an ongoing Department of Justice investigation regarding how employees at the
China-based ByteDance, which owns TikTok, illicitly used TikTok data to track
American journalists without their knowledge.
When asked if TikTok
could prevent similar use of its data in the future by ByteDance employees,
TikTok CEO Shou Chew said that ByteDance had not conducted surveillance on
Americans.
“I first of all disagree
with the characterization that it was spying,” Chew said during a March 23
House Energy and Commerce hearing on the issue of TikTok’s data privacy
practices.
“It was an internal
investigation,” Chew added.
ByteDance maintains deep
ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which rules China as a single-party
state, and its employees have sought to silence those critical of the company’s
ties to the regime including by using TikTok.
Project Raven was just
such a campaign, conducted by ByteDance employees who illicitly stalked American journalists by
cross-referencing private geolocation data from TikTok, including the
journalists’ IP addresses, to identify whether the journalists had frequented
the same areas as ByteDance employees suspected of leaking information about
the company’s ties to the CCP.
The team that oversaw
that surveillance campaign was ByteDance’s Internal Audit and Risk Control
department, a Beijing-based unit responsible for conducting investigations into
potential misconduct by current and former ByteDance employees.
Both ByteDance and TikTok
have since tried to distance themselves from the incident by claiming that
Project Raven was conceived and carried out by rogue employees acting on their
own initiative.
To that end, Chew said in
his prepared testimony that TikTok employees were also involved in the incident
but that they are no longer with the company. He did not clarify what role the
former TikTok employees had played in the campaign.
“We do not condone the
effort by certain former employees to access U.S. TikTok user data in an
attempt to identify the source of leaked confidential information,” Chew said.
Chew then added that “we
condemned these actions after learning about them” and made “swift disciplinary
actions,” but did not clarify whether the “we” referred to TikTok or ByteDance.
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