March 14, 2024
The Coalition has all but demanded that the government follow the United States’ lower house and tell TikTok’s Chinese parent company to sell the app or face a ban.
The social media app is used by a third of Australians.
In a letter to the government seen by The Australian Financial Review, opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson said the country could not afford to be left behind after the US House of Representatives approved an anti-TikTok bill.
“Urgent action is required to address the threat posed by authoritarian regimes that seek to disrupt our democracy and public discourse through targeted disinformation campaigns online,” Senator Paterson wrote.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton backed his colleagues, suggesting that Australia’s intelligence agencies had evidence to support a crackdown on TikTok, but Prime Minister Anthony Albanese rebuffed calls for a ban and defended the app on free speech grounds.
Senator Paterson said China-based TikTok employees had access to Australian user data and said TikTok had manipulated content here. He called on the government to “consider similar steps” regarding the app’s future to those of the US, without explicitly calling for a ban.
US President Joe Biden has signalled that he will sign the TikTok bill into law if it passes the Senate, where its future is uncertain, amid intensifying economic and geostrategic competition between the great powers.
Former president Donald Trump, who tried to force ByteDance to sell TikTok when he was in office, has backflipped and is wavering on the bill, but Republicans overwhelmingly support it.
The prime minister said the government was taking advice from security agencies but rejected calls for a ban on TikTok. “We have no plans to do that. I think you’ve got to be pretty cautious,” he said on radio station WSFM.
“You’ve always got to have national security concerns front and centre, but you also need to acknowledge that for a whole lot of people, this provides a way of them communicating.”
The Australian government has banned TikTok on its devices, although other non-Chinese apps are also commonly forbidden by federal departments. Should ByteDance sell TikTok’s US operations, that could still leave the app under the Chinese company’s control in Australia, and similarly, the app would still be available here if the US banned it.
TikTok, which claims 8.5 million Australian users, has launched an aggressive lobbying campaign against the US bill, which passed the House of Representatives on Thursday AEDT and would mandate a ban if there is no sale in five months.
“This legislation if signed into law will lead to a ban on TikTok in the United States,” said TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Zi Chew, in a video on the app. “This bill gives more power to a handful of social media companies and take billions of dollars out of the pockets of creators and small businesses. It will put more than 300,000 American jobs at risk.”
He said TikTok kept its users’ data secure and their experience on the app safe. US politicians have been overwhelmed by calls from concerned TikTok users after it put a prominent pop-up ad in its app opposing the ban.
Mr Dutton told a press conference on Thursday that TikTok was not keeping children’s data safe and urged Mr Albanese to act. “If he’s got advice from the agencies, which I believe he has, that the information is being hoovered up, and young people don’t have a safe presence online, [then] it’s up to the prime minister to respond in the appropriate way.”
China has reacted furiously to the US ban. A foreign ministry spokesman called it unfair and said it would “inevitably come back to bite the United States itself”.
A TikTok Australia spokeswoman welcomed Mr Albanese’s remarks and said restrictions on the app here would affect 350,000 local businesses. In India, where TikTok was banned in 2020, polling showed most users switched to Instagram.
