It doesn’t get any clearer than that.

Yesterday, Yintao Yu, a former ByteDance executive, alleged the company gave Chinese Communist Party members access to Hong Kong activists’ TikTok data.

The allegations were part of a US court filing. The filing reports users who uploaded “protest-related content” were identified and monitored. According to Mr. Yu, ByteDance/TikTok also had access to US user data.

How Was It Done

According to court documents filed in San Francisco Superior Court, the Chinese Communist Party had access to a superuser account which allowed them to view all data collected by TikTok. Mr. Yu stated the CCP members were not employees of ByteDance and knowledge of the CCP having a superuser account was known since 2017.

ByteDance calls the allegations, “baseless,” of course.

A Bad Stretch for TikTok

The last couple of years have been bad for TikTok. User surveillance suspicions began during President Donald Trump’s administration. At the time, the President tried to find a stateside buyer for the company that ultimately failed.

Since then, numerous states and the federal government have banned TikTok from state owned devices and Congress taking actions to ban the app outright.Congress grilled TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew for 4.5 hours over the app’s data user policies. And Montana successfully banned the app statewide last month.

All of these apps are bad for you, all of these apps are privacy sinkholes, and none of these apps are good for society.

And before you start talking trash about TikTok on Twitter, remember the Saudi government has a greater ownership stake in Twitter than the CCP in TikTok.

-MJ