Forget a Ban — Why Are Journalists Using TikTok in the First Place?

The TikTok logo displayed on a laptop screen with a glowing keyboard in Krakow, Poland, on March 3, 2024. Photo: Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images

As far as I know, there are no laws against eating broken glass. You're free to doomscroll through your cabinets, smash your favorite water cup, then scarf down the shards.

A ban on eating broken glass would be overwhelmingly irrelevant, since most people just don't do it, and for good reason. Unfortunately, you can't say the same about another dangerous habit: TikTok.

As a security researcher, I can't help but hate TikTok, just like I hate all social media, for creating unnecessary personal exposure.

As a security researcher working in journalism, one group of the video-sharing app's many, many users give me heartburn. These users strike a particular fear into my heart. This group of users is - you guessed it - my beloved colleagues, the journalists.

TikTok, of course, isn't the only app that poses risks for journalists, but it's been bizarre to watch reporters with sources to protect express concern about a TikTok ban when they shouldn't be using the platform in the first place. TikTok officials, after all, have explicitly targeted reporters in attempts to reveal their sources.

My colleagues seem to nonetheless be dressing up as bullseyes.

Ignoring TikTok's Record

Impassioned pleas by reporters to not ban TikTok curiously omit TikTok's most egregious attacks on reporters.

In his defense of TikTok, the Daily Beast's Brad Polumbo offers a disclaimer in the first half of the headline - TikTok Is Bad. Banning It Would Be Much Worse" - but never expands upon why. Instead, the bulk of the piece offers an apologia for TikTok's parent company, ByteDance.

Meanwhile, Vox's A.W. Ohlheiser expatiates on the both/and" of TikTok, highlighting its many perceived benefits and ills. And yet, the one specific ill, which could have the most impact on Ohlheiser and other reporters, is absent from the laundry list of downsides.

The record is well established. In an attempt to identify reporters' sources, ByteDance accessed IP addresses and other user data of several journalists, according to a Forbes investigation. The intention seems to have been to track the location of the reporters to see if they were in the same locations as TikTok employees who may have been sources for stories about TikTok's links to China.

Not only did TikTok surveil reporters in attempts to identify their sources, but the company also proceeded to publicly deny having done so.

TikTok does not collect precise GPS location information from US users, meaning TikTok could not monitor US users in the way the article suggested," the TikTok communication team's account posted on X in response to Forbes's initial reporting. TikTok has never been used to target' any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journalists."

Forbes kept digging, and its subsequent investigation found that an internal email acknowledged that TikTok had been used in exactly this way," as reporter Emily Baker-White put it.

TikTok did various probes into the company's accessing of U.S. user data; officials were fired and at least one resigned, according to Forbes. That doesn't change the basic facts: Not only did TikTok surveil reporters in attempts to identify their sources, but the company also proceeded to publicly deny having done so.

And Now, Service Journalism for Journalists

For my journalism colleagues, there may well be times when you need to check TikTok, for instance when researching a story. If this is the case, you should follow the operational security best practice of compartmentalization: keeping various items separated from one another.

In other words, put TikTok on a separate burner" device, which doesn't have anything sensitive on it, like your sources saved in its contacts. There's no evidence TikTok can see, for example, your chat histories, but it can, according to the security research firm Proofpoint, access your device's location data, contacts list, as well as camera and microphone. And, as as a security researcher, I like to be as safe as possible.

And keep the burner device in a separate location from your regular phone. Don't walk around with both phones turned on and connected to a cellular or Wi-Fi network and, for the love of everything holy, don't take the burner to sensitive source meetings.

You can also limit the permissions that your device gives to TikTok - so that you're not handing the app your aforementioned location data, contacts list, and camera access - and you should. Only allow the app to do things that are required for the app to run, and only run enough to do your research.

And don't forget, this is all for your research. When you're done looking up whatever in our hellscape tech dystopia has brought you to this tremendous time suck, the burner device should be wiped and restored to factory defaults.

The security and disinformation risks posed to journalists are, of course, not unique to TikTok. They permeate, one way or another, every single social media platform.

That doesn't explain journalists' inscrutable defense of a medium that is actively working against them. It's as clear as your favorite water cup.

Editor's note: You can follow The Intercept on TikTok here.

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