December 11, 2024
The Coalition has criticised Labor’s reluctance to follow the Biden administration’s bid to force ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a ban, after a US appeals court rejected the company’s efforts to overturn the law.
TikTok’s bid to reverse a bill signed into law by United States President Joe Biden in April failed in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals over the weekend, setting the stage for a blanket US ban on the short-form video-sharing app from 19 January next year.
The law was introduced following mounting national security concerns in the US and other democracies over whether TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, could be compelled to share the data of US citizens with Chinese authorities.
The opposition’s home affairs spokesman James Paterson said that decision should serve as a “wake-up call” for the Albanese government and argued Labor should have introduced legislation accounting for the ban before parliament rose for the year.
“Due to this government’s inaction, we could find ourselves in a bizarre situation as early as next month where there is a safer version of TikTok offered to US citizens that is free from Chinese government control, while Australia continues to be exposed to the national security risks the US government deemed unacceptable,” Paterson told Capital Brief.
TikTok first moved to sue the US government in May. On Tuesday, the app sought to pause the legislation in order to have it reviewed by the US Supreme Court.
The social media giant said the delay would also allow time for president-elect Donald Trump to formalise his administration’s position on the law, which could see a TikTok ban take effect one day before his inauguration. Trump's allies expect him to try to intervene to prevent the ban.
Representatives of TikTok did not answer questions about the implications a US ban would have on the app’s Australian operations.
“The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue,” TikTok said in a statement on 7 December.
“Unfortunately, the TikTok ban was conceived and pushed through based upon inaccurate, flawed and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship of the American people. The TikTok ban, unless stopped, will silence the voices of over 170 million Americans here in the US and around the world on January 19th, 2025.”
Following the bill’s passage, ByteDance was given 270 days to find a buyer for TikTok, which is reportedly worth between US$40 billion ($62.5 billion) and US$50 billion.
The legal challenge follows a period of explosive user growth for TikTok, which has been matched by increasing global scrutiny.
In Australia, the app was banned from government devices last year and later became the focus of a privacy probe by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC). The OAIC’s preliminary inquiry did not make any formal findings against TikTok.
The Australian government has been monitoring developments in the US following the bill’s introduction earlier this year. However, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke did not answer questions about the implications of a US ban for Australia.
“We’ve already taken strong action to restrict access to various pieces of software on devices that handle sensitive information,” a spokesperson for Burke told Capital Brief.
“We’re following events in the US closely and will continue to take advice from our security and intelligence agencies.”
Launched in September 2016, TikTok reached 8.5 million monthly active users in Australia last year, while the US now boasts more than 170 million users.
The platform was also the subject of a high-level Australian government security review, ordered by former Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil.
The review, which included input from the Australian Signals Directorate and the Australian Cyber Security Centre, was completed, but it has been shelved since at least March 2023. Capital Brief has been denied access to the review under Freedom of Information laws on the basis that the document is subject to cabinet.
“The Coalition has been calling for stronger protections for Australians since July 2022 when TikTok admitted to storing Australian user data in China, and it is past time that the Albanese government took serious action to protect Australians from the threat of cyber-enabled espionage and foreign interference,” Paterson said.
“The minister for home affairs and cyber security should move quickly to action his department’s review into the national security risks of social media and the bipartisan Senate committee report released last year, both of which dealt with these issues.”
