Forbes’ articles on tiktok are always a mixed bag. TikTok and bytedance can’t be interchanged 1:1, and TikTok does not exist in China. The whistleblower didn’t work for TikTok, they worked for bytedance. Forbes knows this.<p>And then there’s things like this: “The former employee did not claim that ByteDance had knowledge of, or was complicit in, the Chinese police’s alleged intimidation of his father.”, in an article with a headline that forms a soft implication between TikTok and this incident. But it wasn’t a “TikTok” whistleblower.
All reporting about TikTok is hard to take seriously while there’s so much political energy pushing narratives.