It seems that every time TikTok takes one step forward on the path toward earning the trust of users and regulators, the ByteDance-owned video creation application then takes two steps back.

Hannah Murphy of Financial Times reported that four employees on the ByteDance internal audit team—two in China and two in the U.S.—improperly obtained the user data for FT journalist Cristina Criddle, an unnamed BuzzFeed journalist and an unspecified number of users connected to those journalists as part of an investigation into internal leaks.