Lots of cognitive dissonance going on, I would bet.
In the US now, every story that has anything to do with China is reduced to "the CCP."
This is a story about a tech company abusing its access to user data to try to track down which of its employees were talking to journalists. This could be a story about a Chinese company, an American company, or a company from pretty much any country.
“TikTok has never been used to ‘target’ any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journalists,”
The ongoing controversy with TikTok has always been about the concern of the government of China using TikTok data and manipulation of its content in clandestine ways. It all goes back to CCP.
* Zhang Yiming, founder / CEO of ByteDance until 2021: not a member of the Communist Party.
* Kevin A. Mayer, COO and CEO of TikTok during 2020: not a member of the Communist Party.
* Rubo Liang, CEO since 2021: not a member of the Communist Party.
* Lidong Zhang, Chairman of ByteDance China: I can't find any reference to him being a member of the Communist Party.
* Alex Zhu, founder of Musical.ly, the predecessor of TikTok, and former CEO of TikTok: not a member of the Communist Party.
I'm sure there are some executives that are members of the Communist Party, but looking at the top people, that just doesn't pop out.
> The ongoing controversy with TikTok has always been about the concern of the government of China using TikTok data and manipulation of its content in clandestine ways.
That's the way literally every issue even tangentially related to China is spun in the US nowadays. This is actually a story about a tech company trying to find leakers by looking at the user data of the journalists they met with. It gets turned into a story about how the Communist Party is going to infiltrate and undermine the United States, using an app that teenagers use to show off their dance moves. The paranoia about China has gone just a bit too far for my liking.
News Corp hacked phones to track people, they just got caught and punished.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hac...
* Golden handcuffs, but intending to move away once they vest.
* Actively trying to move away, but want to have a new role at that/better level lined up.
* They might've been eased into it through deception (e.g., someone raises a concern internally, they're assured that's not happening or has stopped, and only later it's in the news that it's happening anyway).
* Or, really, "tech" has pervasive ethical flexibility. Figuratively, the same kind of people who were looting pension funds in the 1980s are now selling out computer users, and they've normalized a lot of sociopathy, so the party is open to a lot more people. Normalized, it's easy to rationalize doing just a little more. Example: "Oh no, they're monitoring journalists." Which is something almost every startup Web site starts participating in, on their first day of business, when they add third-party trackers, and then often they add to that.