TikTok counters Forbes article that said it planned to track US citizens

(Representational Image: Solen Feyissa via Unsplash)

Recently, Forbes published an article where it said that TikTok, the popular social media phenomenon, was planning to use the app to monitor the location of specific individuals in the US.

According to material seen by Forbes, TikTok's internal audit and risk control department planned to collect TikTok data of "the location of a U.S. citizen who had never had an employment relationship with the company". While it remains unclear if the data was actually collected, Forbes said that the plan was "for a Beijing-based ByteDance team to obtain location information from U.S. users' devices".

TikTok has now hit back at the allegations. In a series of tweets, the Chinese social media platform said that Forbes' reporting lacked "rigor and journalistic integrity" and that the article had intentionally withheld a portion of the statement that they shared, which stated that "TikTok does not collect precise GPS location information from US users".

The company also clarified that the platform has never been used to "target" any specific individuals "of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journalists, nor do we serve them a different content experience than other users".

1/ @Forbes' reporting about TikTok continues to lack both rigor and journalistic integrity. https://t.co/HYF16KezqS

— TikTokComms (@TikTokComms) October 20, 2022