The left-liberal cabal and the Democrats for the whole last year tried to downplay or falsify any and everything that came out of Donald Trump’s mouth. Be it the Wuhan lab leak theory or the Chinese app Tik Tok being in consonance with the Chinese Communist Party. However, now a story just similar to the Wuhan lab leak theory is coming to light and proving what former President Donald Trump has been saying all along. Trump was right, company insiders warn against the Biden administration on his TikTok policy.
Former TikTok employees believe the Chinese parent firm of the popular social media app is a source of concern. According to the report, ByteDance has access to TikTok’s American user data and is heavily involved in the company’s decision-making and product development in Los Angeles. Some cybersecurity experts are concerned that the Chinese government could utilise TikTok to transmit propaganda or censorship to an American audience or to exert control over users who may later regret what they posted on the platform.
According to a former TikTok recruiter, her hours were intended to be from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., but she frequently found herself working double shifts. Because the company’s Beijing-based ByteDance management was highly involved in TikTok’s decision-making and wanted the company’s California staff to be available at all hours of the day, she explained. Employees of TikTok, she claimed, were required to return to work during Chinese business hours to answer inquiries from their ByteDance colleagues.
This recruiter, along with four other former workers, told CNBC that they are concerned about the popular social media app’s Chinese parent firm, which they claim has access to American user data and is actively involved in decision-making and product development at the Los Angeles company. For fear of retaliation from the firm, these individuals requested anonymity.
As per Economic Times, sources said late last year that the then US President had agreed to give an ultimatum of 45 days to ByteDance, which owns the video-sharing app- TikTok. The ultimatum makes it clear that ByteDance will have to negotiate a deal with Microsoft Corp. within 45 days, otherwise, TikTok will end up getting banned.
Then Trump also said that any deal would have to include a “substantial amount of money” coming to the US treasury. He added, “Right now they don’t have any rights unless we give it to them. So if we’re going to give them the rights, then … it has to come into this country.” He added that TikTok owes its success to the US. The US President said, “TikTok is a tremendous success, but a big portion of it’s in this country.”
In September 2017, TikTok made its international debut. Musical.ly, a social app that was increasing in popularity in the United States, was purchased by its parent company, ByteDance, for $1 billion in November 2017, and the two were merged in August 2018. In just a few years, it has grown to about 92 million users in the United States. According to a Piper Sandler analysis from October 2020, TikTok has eclipsed Instagram as the second-most popular social media app among teens and young adults in the United States, after Snapchat.
One employee, in particular, claimed that ByteDance personnel have access to user data from the United States. This was demonstrated in a circumstance where a TikTok employee wanted a list of global users, including Americans, who searched for or interacted with a specific sort of material — that is, individuals who searched for a specific phrase or hashtag or liked a specific category of videos. To get access to the information, this individual had to contact a data team in China. Users’ individual IDs were included in the data the employee received, and they could access any information TikTok possessed on particular users.
Graham Webster, editor in chief of the Stanford-New America DigiChina Project at the Stanford University Cyber Policy Center, notes that most of the data that TikTok collects could just as easily be gathered by the Chinese government through other services. China doesn’t need its own consumer app to exploit Americans’ data, he said.