Emily Baker-White, recipient of the NYFWA’s 2024 Impact Award for Distinguished Financial Journalism, discusses how she broke one of the biggest tech stories.
Her groundbreaking series of articles on privacy breaches at TikTok, the world’s most popular social media app, at both Forbes and BuzzFeed News. Her reporting on TikTok, with 1.6 billion active users worldwide today, ripped the veil off of privacy promises from the app’s executives, showing that TikTok’s Chinese owners had regularly accessed the private data of its U.S. users. Baker-White’s many scoops helped reshape the global conversation and debate about the controversial app, and her articles were often cited by political leaders in the U.S., UK, Australia and New Zealand as they took steps to reduce their exposure to TikTok. These steps included passage of a new law by the U.S. Congress in 2024 requiring TikTok’s Chinese owners, ByteDance, to sell the U.S. unit of TikTok. Baker-White is writing a book about TikTok to be published this fall.
Veteran journalist and Impact Award Chairman Greg Miles interviews Baker-White, now a senior writer and investigative reporter at Forbes, about the tools she used to break her TikTok stories, and issues including the app’s global influence as a cultural and propaganda tool, and whether a sale of TikTok’s U.S. unit would meaningfully protect users’ privacy. The potential sale of TikTok was blocked by the Chinese government in early April in retaliation for President Trump’s imposition of tariffs on China.