[PJ] "I literally worked on a project that gave U.S. data to China," former TikTok senior data scientist Evan Turner revealed on Monday in a Fortune report. According to Turner, his efforts went far beyond what social media apps usually do, which is to upload every scrap of data they can get hold of to the parent company's servers.
"Every two weeks," the Spectator reported, "Turner emailed spreadsheets filled with data on hundreds of thousands of US users to [TikTok owner] ByteDance workers in Beijing."
"The driver’s licenses of American users were also accessible on the platform," the New York Times wrote last year, "as were some users’ potentially illegal content, such as child sexual abuse materials. In many cases, the information was available in Lark 'groups' — essentially chat rooms of employees — with thousands of members." Just to be clear, ByteDance is headquartered in Beijing and is closely knit with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Worse, if that's even possible, Turner said, "There were Americans that were working in upper management that were completely complicit in this."
After President Donald Trump's ultimately failed effort to ban TikTok, the company promised to establish independence from ByteDance. It would start using U.S.-based servers and stop sending all its data to Beijing. But Fortune also reported that according to Turner, "the stealth chain of command contradicted what TikTok’s executives had said about the company’s independence from ByteDance."
Believe it or not, this grown-up Cold War kid who despises Communist China every bit as much as I did the Soviet Union way back when is less concerned with the data ByteDance gives to the CCP than I am with TikTok's manipulation of kids. The thing to remember about the Western version of TikTok is that it's what I call social malware.
There's a reason Chaya Raichik's LibsOfTikTok has so much material to use. TikTok's algorithm is tweaked to highlight the weirdest, the worst, and the most divisive content — served up to young minds who assume that the weirdest, the worst, and the most divisive is normal. It's what they see, and it's what their friends see on social media. 
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