Elon Musk recently questioned whether short video app TikTok is leading to the collapse of civilization, following a new report that alleged the China-owned platform had obtained private U.S. user data.
“Is TikTok destroying civilization?” the billionaire said on June 17 via Twitter. “Some people think so,” his post reads, offering no further explanation.
The remarks came after leaked audio from more than 80 internal meetings showed employees of TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company ByteDance have “repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about U.S. TikTok users” in China, according to Buzzfeed. It said the recordings include 14 statements from nine employees who indicated engineers had access to U.S. user data “at the very least” for five months between September 2021 and January 2022….