August 5, 2022
LONDON: British MPs sanctioned by Beijing have praised a decision by the Commons Speaker to act on their demands and shut down the parliament’s official TikTok account, decrying the Chinese owned social media platform as a data harvester.
The account on the hugely popular video-sharing platform was part of a pilot to encourage more voters to engage with the UK’s democratic processes. But the MPs were ‘‘surprised and disappointed’’ to learn that parliament had established the account as TikTok data was ‘‘routinely transferred to China’’.
‘‘While efforts made to engage young people in the history and functioning of parliament should always be welcomed, we cannot and should not legitimise the use of an app which has been described by tech experts as ‘essentially Chinese government spyware’,’’ Tory MPs, including Nusrat Ghani, Tim Loughton, Iain Duncan Smith and the Labour peer Helena Kennedy wrote.
All were sanctioned by China last year, in a move Beijing said was retaliation for joint EU-UK and Canadian sanctions against Chinese officials over human rights abuses against Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
Speaker Lindsay Hoyle and his counterpart in the Lords wrote to the MPs and said they were not consulted on the TikTok pilot and ordered the account be closed immediately. ‘‘The account was an attempt to engage with younger audiences – who are not always active on our existing social media platforms – regarding the work of the parliament,’’ the pair wrote. ‘‘However, in light of your feedback and concerns expressed to us, we have decided that the account should be closed with immediate effect.
’’Duncan Smith, who is co-founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China – an international cross party group of more than 100 MPs –said other government departments should also close down their accounts.
‘‘TikTok is an established security risk and I am pleased the UK parliament has closed their account,’’ the former Tory party leader told The Age.
‘‘Government departments must now do the same and I hope MPs will follow suit.
‘‘It is a data harvester which, by Chinese law, is bound to pass on their data to the Chinese security services on demand.
‘‘We need to wake up to the serious threat that the Chinese government poses to our freedoms and the freedom of those nations near to China.
’’Loughton said it would have been extraordinary for parliament to have promoted a company linked to the Communist party state while seven MPs remained sanctioned.
‘‘The Speakers of the Commons and Lords are to be congratulated for acting so swiftly to emphasise how there must be consequences when the Chinese government have acted so arbitrarily and unjustly to sanction the voices of British parliamentarians doing their job and highlighting the industrial scale human rights abuses and genocide being carried out on their watch,’’ he said.
Australian Senator James Paterson, who chaired the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security and is co-chair of IPAC, said MPs should consider their own presence on the platform. ‘‘I don’t use TikTok, and I encourage all Australian MPs who do to carefully consider whether they are willing to run the risk their data could be accessed by Chinese government security agencies,’’ he said.
