August 4, 2023
Justine Landis-Hanley
The Canberra Times
Friday 4 August 2023
A federal inquiry has called on the government to consider banning WeChat on government-issued devices and monitor the use of social media platforms within the Australian Public Service.
The moves, if adopted, would represent the biggest crackdown against foreign interference within the public service since staff at dozens of agencies were ordered to delete TikTok from their work devices in April.
The calls come from the Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media, which this week tabled its report with 17 recommendations to tackle targeted disinformation campaigns and foreign surveillance.
Recommendations also included establishing a new office within the Department of Home Affairs to assess high risk apps and ban them from being installed on government devices. Bans on specific apps should extend to include all government contractors' devices who have access to government data.
Committee chair, Liberal senator James Paterson, said that social media has the power to affect "the health of our democracies", a fact that "foreign authoritarian states know".
"Social media platforms are the new town square. They are the place where news is first reported, contentious issues are debated, consensus is formed, and public policy decisions are shaped," he said.
The shadow minister for cyber security and countering foreign interference argued that foreign actors were using social media platforms to target users with disinformation campaigns that "shape our decision-making in their national interest".
The Senate inquiry heard of the ways that social media platforms were being used to collect data on people, threaten diaspora communities, promote preferred election candidates and cast doubt over official election results.
While there is no recommendation in the report to regulate the use of TikTok on public servants' personal phones, Senator Paterson cautioned that those who use these applications on their own devices "should carefully consider whether they are willing to accept that risk".
But Greens senators and committee-members Sarah Hanson-Young and David Shoebridge said that banning TikTok or any other singular platform from government devices is "nothing but a game of digital whack-a-mole".
"Bad actors will use their vast resources through whatever means necessary to meet their objectives and until we address the underlying causes Australians will continue to be subject to foreign interference threats," they wrote in additional comments within the report.
The Senate committee singled out TikTok and WeChat, whose parent companies and the majority of their employees are headquartered in "authoritarian countries" like China, and therefore beholden to China's 2017 National Intelligence Law.
The law allows the Chinese government to require these companies to cooperate with Chinese intelligence agencies. In the case of TikTok, the committee heard that employees in China have accessed Australian user data and can manipulate the algorithms that determine what content someone is fed.
The committee also called on the government to require all large social media platforms to meet a minimum set of transparency requirements - including the requirement to have a physical presence in Australia - or face fines or the prospect of not being able to operate in the country.
This could cause problems for a company like WeChat who has no physical presence in Australia.
While TikTok appeared in public hearings before the committee, WeChat, and its parent company Tencent, declined.
The government is yet to respond to the committee's recommendations.
