According to materials reviewed by Forbes, ByteDance tracked multiple Forbes journalists as part of this covert surveillance campaign, which was designed to unearth the source of leaks inside the company following a drumbeat of stories exposing the company’s ongoing links to China.Asked for comment on that story, ByteDance and TikTok did not deny the surveillance, but took to Twitter after the story was published to say that “TikTok has never been used to ‘target’ any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journalists,” and that “TikTok could not monitor U.S. users in the way the article suggested.” In the internal email, Liang acknowledged that TikTok had been used in exactly this way, as Forbes had reported.“This is a direct assault on the idea of a free press and its critical role in a functioning democracy.” The investigation, internally known as Project Raven, began this summer after BuzzFeed News published a story revealing that China-based ByteDance employees had repeatedly accessed U.S. user data, based on more than 80 hours of audio recordings of internal TikTok meetings.“The DoJ has also been promising for over a year that they are looking into ways to protect U.S. user data from Bytedance and the CCP — it’s time to come forward with that solution or Congress could soon be forced to step in.” According to an internal email sent Thursday by Andersen, ByteDance found that several of its employees obtained the data of “a former BuzzFeed reporter and a Financial Times reporter,” as well as a “small number of people connected to the reporters” through their TikTok accounts.TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chew wrote in his own email to employees, “We take data security incredibly seriously,” adding that the company’s Project Texas, which would limit China-based access to U.S. user data (and which was first reported by Baker-White at BuzzFeed News) was a “testament to that commitment.” In 2021, TikTok became the most visited website in the world, but the app’s ownership by Chinese tech giant ByteDance has raised serious concerns about the company’s access to the personal information of millions of U.S. citizens, as well as its capacity to manipulate and influence user content."