The Biden administration has recently ramped up pressure on TikTok over national security concerns stemming from its ties to China, and apparently the Justice Department and the FBI are also applying pressure of their own.
Forbes first reported that the agencies are actively investigating ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company. The investigation was reportedly initiated after some employees leveraged the app to spy on U.S.-based journalists — an incident corroborated by an internal investigation late last year.
Now, The New York Times and other outlets have matched Forbes’ reporting, confirming that the Fraud Section of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division is coordinating with the FBI and the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia to investigate the breach of user privacy.
In the internal investigation, ByteDance found that some employees accessed data on American journalists’ TikTok accounts in order to investigate who at the company was leaking information to reporters. Of employees involved in the incident — who were fired after the fact — two were part of the company’s operations in China.
The latest revelations come a week before TikTok’s CEO is scheduled to testify before Congress — an appearance that’s likely t …
