Lawsuit: China Spied on Hong Kong Activists Using TikTok

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Facts

• Former ByteDance executive Yintao Yu claimed in a wrongful dismissal lawsuit that the Chinese government can obtain user data collected from ByteDance-owned TikTok through a “god credential” that it used to spy on Hong Kong activists and protesters in 2018.¹
• Yu, a former head of engineering at ByteDance in the US, also claimed in the court filing — made this week in a San Francisco Superior Court — that 'protest-related content' uploaded by users was flagged and monitored.²
• Yu's lawsuit said that superuser credentials were 'commonly discussed between employees at various levels of the company, including senior executives,” and there was 'a backdoor to any barrier ByteDance had supposedly installed to protect data from the CCP’s surveillance.”³
• Users, including protesters, supporters, and civil rights activists involved in the 2018 Hong Kong protests, were tracked and identified, with the PRC government allegedly being able to access their network data, SIM card information, and IP addresses.⁴
• Dismissing Yu's accusations as 'baseless,' ByteDance claimed that these claims were intended to garner media attention. It also said that Yu was only employed by the company for less than one year, working on a now-discontinued app called Flipagram.⁵
• TikTok is facing mounting scrutiny from Western nations, with the US, UK, and Canada banning it on government-issued devices. The Biden admin. has stated a complete ban is possible unless the platform is sold.⁶

Sources: ¹Al Jazeera, ²BBC News, ³Time, ⁴Wion, ⁵Al arabiya english and ⁶Guardian.

Narratives

• Anti-China narrative, as provided by Fortune. More and more evidence is emerging that TikTok is being used as a vehicle for Beijing's espionage. Pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, who merely sought fair political representation, were systematically targeted by the CCP, and it seems that TikTok was a useful weapon in tracking their movements. More legal action against ByteDance must be undertaken.
• Pro-China narrative, as provided by Global times. Though the US media continues to baselessly accuse China of spying, the reality is that the US runs the biggest espionage outfit in the entire world. Even though Washington's massive global surveillance programs have been extensively documented, the US continues to maliciously accuse China of being the main espionage 'threat' facing the world today.