DOJ officials investigating TikTok parent company over reports of tracking journalists via the app
Yahoo Finance tech editor Dan Howley joins the Live show to discuss a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into TikTok and reports it tracked some journalists.
Video Transcript
- The US Justice Department is investigating TikTok's parent company ByteDance over allegations that it spied on US citizens, specifically reporters who were covering the company according to the New York Times report. The investigation began last year. Yahoo Finance's Tech Editor is here with more, Dan Howley. Dan?
DAN HOWLEY: That's right. And this goes back to a report that Forbes had done. Now these are some of the journalists that were spied on, the ones who were writing about this at Forbes. And they say that the DOJ is looking into TikTok. Originally they had been doing reporting at BuzzFeed where they were about TikTok's internal practices and so according to them, and frankly TikTok or ByteDance, there were employees at ByteDance, two in China and some others somewhere, who had looked into these reporters as well as their kind of associates to try to find out where the source of the leaks were.
By doing that, they obviously were spying on these journalists and their associates trying to gather up information. ByteDance went ahead, came forward, and said that they did this investigation. That they fired the employees that were involved. And they regret that this happened.
Obviously, horrible timing on their part. This is before Biden was calling for them to sell or get lost. This was when they were still trying to negotiate. But we did still have people on both sides of the aisle in Washington saying we need to ban the app. The app is already being banned. So it just comes at an even worse time now that there's this confirmation of this DOJ investigation. They're working with the FBI and the US attorney of the Eastern District of Virginia.
So you know what this all means, it's hard to tell. Will they pay a fine? Will there be some kind of penalty? We really don't know. I don't think it's going to come down to the app being banned because of this. We have Biden saying we want it banned. Congress do something and I'll back it up. Or saying, look, ByteDance has to sell TikTok and divest itself.
We do have TikTok's CEO going to Washington next Thursday. And obviously we'll be following that live. I don't expect it to be much except for a dog and pony show where we have a lot of grandstanding. Look, this isn't where the issues are going to be sorted out in this kind of public setting. I think it's really going to come down to whether or not Congress passes something. And then it'll all come down to the courts.
- Dan Howley, thanks so much.
