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March 18, 2024
Australia should pass new laws to curb the power of TikTok and protect the community from misinformation on the social media app, a leading security expert has warned after days of political dispute over Chinese control of the popular platform.
Cybersecurity expert Fergus Ryan said it had become "trivially easy" for TikTok to influence Australian debate because it had swollen to 8.5 million users.
The comments came after Coalition cybersecurity and home affairs spokesman James Paterson labelled TikTok a "bad-faith actor" and urged the government to join other countries in trying to remove the influence of the Chinese Communist Party on its operations.
Debate about TikTok has surged after the US House of Representatives voted last week to force the sale of the platform by its Chinese owner, a stance backed by President Joe Biden but opposed by former president Donald Trump, amid uncertainty about whether the Senate would agree to the bill and whether it could withstand a court challenge.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Saturday that the government had "no plans" to move beyond existing rules that forbid ministers and government officials using TikTok on phones with sensitive information.
"There are millions of Australians engaged in TikTok, who use it for communication with each other, and we think that you've got to think very carefully, in my view, before you start banning things as a first stop," he said.
Paterson countered by arguing that security officials knew of problems with the platform and its owner, Chinese company ByteDance, because of the way data from Australian users could be sent to China and the potential for the platform to distort democratic debate.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton stepped up his warnings about TikTok last week but did not call for the platform to be banned, arguing instead that it was the prime minister's job to consider advice from security experts and make the right decision, whether that was a ban or another option.
Ryan, an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute who has written several papers on TikTok, said the platform had grown to such a scale that there was a case for legislation that singled it out for attention.
A key issue, he said, was the way ByteDance could harvest data from Australian users so it could "take the temperature" of national debate in real-time and make some content including misinformation more prominent to millions of users.
"That gives them an enormous amount of power if they wish to subtly promote or demote certain types of content on the app," he said. "When it comes to political discourse, they can essentially put their thumb on the scale to ensure that messages that the Chinese Communist Party supports are promoted, or things that they don't wish to be promoted are demoted.
"It would be trivially easy for them to do that, and also extremely difficult for anyone to detect that it's happening. So it's a very insidious problem."
National cybersecurity coordinator Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness said she believed security threats were far greater than shown by public data.
While a cyber incident is reported in Australia every six minutes, McGuiness said this was "just the tip of the iceberg" of the threat from attacks and other breaches.
McGuinness said she and Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil were preparing to launch a major education campaign to protect themselves from cyberattacks.
