Every Screen on the Planet by Emily Baker-White

Author:Emily Baker-White [Baker-White, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2025-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24 The Misguided Effort

In October 2022, a few weeks after I first began reporting on Roland Cloutier and Chris Lepitak, I was sitting in a glass-walled conference room in Forbes’s Jersey City headquarters with about fifteen colleagues when I received a call from a number I vaguely recognized—a source who had given me valuable information about both execs a few weeks before. The source wanted to know if I could talk, right away. I hurried into a vacant office and started taking notes. Chris Lepitak had ordered his staff to investigate us, the source said—and they had the receipts to prove it.

Over an encrypted video call, the source showed me the spreadsheet that Chris and his staffers used to catalogue the TikTok employees that my colleagues and I had reached out to. They showed me that Chris had widened his search for internal documents: staffers were now scouring all employees’ Lark chats for mentions of my name and email address. They were also searching Feishu and Lark Docs, company email accounts, and the company’s OneDrive and Google Docs instances.

But the investigators went further, looking beyond just what was visible in company docs. They asked the Beijing Risk Control team to collect the IP addresses linked to my and two of my colleagues’ TikTok accounts. Once they had those IP addresses, they were ordered to look for TikTok DMs between any ByteDance employees and our accounts, and to cross-reference our IP addresses with the IP addresses of all ByteDance staff. That way, the company would be able to see whether we were in the same place (a coffee shop, for example, or a library, or a public park) at the same time as an employee—a sign that that person might be talking to us.

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