April 28, 2024
Viral short form social video platform TikTok has opted against replacing its most senior Australian executive despite mounting political and regulatory pressure on its local operations amid a federal privacy probe and looming US ban.
The move to not fill the general manager role in Australia, confirmed by a TikTok spokesperson, comes as calls mount for Australia to follow the lead of its key security ally, the US, which effectively moved to ban the app last week. It also comes as the federal privacy regulator confirmed to Capital Brief that it had “significantly progressed” its probe into the company, which is owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance.
Capital Brief broke the news in February that Lee Hunter, then TikTok's Australian general manager, had told associates he would leave the short form video sharing app imminently. He departed the company shortly after the report was published.
Hunter, who had led the company in Australia since May 2020 and previously worked at Google and YouTube, had served as the public face of TikTok in its defence against concerns its app posed a national security threat to Australia.
Since then, Brett Armstrong, general manager of TikTok’s global business solutions in Australia, has emerged as the company's most prominent public figure locally as it fights back against local criticism. Armstrong last week labelled the subject of a possible ban in Australia a “hypothetical” in an interview with the Australian Financial Review.
“TikTok is a platform that is loved by over 8.5 million Australians and 350,000 Australian businesses, with a recent independent study by Oxford Economics finding that we contribute $1.1b and 13,000 jobs to the Australian economy,” Armstrong said in a statement released on Wednesday.
“There is zero evidence suggesting that TikTok is in any way a national security risk, and we welcome the Prime Minister’s recent comments that his Government has no plans to ban us.”
But despite Amstrong's prominence in the media a TikTok spokesperson said he was purely a spokesperson for the company, and that the company is not replacing Hunter. The spokesperson would not be drawn on who is currently the most senior executive in Australia or the company’s local commercial or policy objectives, and instead referred to previous statements.
“Again, I stress that we are not replacing Lee. Brett does not have responsibility for any of Lee's role, he manages a different part of the business. He was purely a spokesperson,” the TikTok spokesperson said.
Coalition senator James Paterson, who has been TikTok's most vocal critic in the federal Parliament, criticised the company for what he said was a lack of transparency over its operations in Australia.
“TikTok is a deeply opaque company that consistently evades legitimate scrutiny. They should be transparent about the recent changes to their Australian leadership structure, and how often our user data is accessed in mainland China and which content they censor and why. Until they do so no one should trust them.”
Armstrong is among TikTok’s small local leadership team in Australia. Other senior staff based in Australia include Brent Thomas, who carries the title “Global Public Policy, Campaign Director” and who previously held senior policy roles at Airbnb and Mastercard in Australia; former Tasmanian political staffer Ella Woods-Joyce, who was promoted as TikTok’s Australian director of public policy in the middle of last year; Simon Bates, the platform’s country head of content and operations and a former Paramount and Fairfax marketing executive, and Dr Jed Horner, the platform’s head of trust and safety for the Oceania region.
TikTok was launched by its Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, in September 2016 and has experienced soaring popularity around the world since then. The platform hit 8.5 million monthly active users in Australia last year.
US President Joe Biden last week signed off on legislation that would force ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a ban of the app in the US. The measure was included in a foreign aid package including funding for Ukraine and Israel, and was passed in the Senate 79 votes to 18.
ByteDance has pledged to fight the legislation, which it has described as "unconstitutional". It also denied a report in The Information that it was exploring ways to sell the app without selling the algorithm that powers it.
TikTok has also faced political pressure in Australia, but it remains unclear whether the US outright ban would be emulated on these shores. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese indicated in March that Australia wouldn't necessarily follow the lead of the US on banning TikTok, despite persistent pressure from the Coalition to do so. A spokesperson for Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said the government was "monitoring events in the US closely, and will take additional advice if any potential sale or new information from our agencies make it necessary."
Australia's Attorney-General last year imposed a ban of the app on government devices, citing intelligence advice.
Late last year, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) launched a probe into TikTok’s data handling practices, after the Australian marketing firm Civic Data urged its clients to remove TikTok’s tracking code, known as Pixel, from their websites over privacy concerns. The OAIC is making preliminary inquiries to determine whether the Commissioner launches a formal investigation.
A spokesperson for the OAIC told Capital Brief the Commissioner had “significantly progressed” its inquiries. It has engaged with TikTok in both Australia and Singapore, one of the platform’s two global headquarters.
Paterson said the government should follow the lead of the US. “TikTok is a national security threat to Australia. It’s such a serious threat that we banned it from all government devices on advice from our national security agencies. Unfortunately that does nothing for the millions of other users of the app who need protection too,” he said.
“The OAIC’s public communications are aligned with our privacy regulatory action policy. The OAIC generally will not comment publicly about ongoing complain investigations, complaint conciliations, CIIs, the content of data breach notifications or the exercise of investigative powers,” the spokesperson told Capital Brief in a statement on Friday.
“However, where a particular incident is of community concern and has already been reported in the media, the OAIC may confirm publicly that it is investigating or making inquiries in relation to the matter but will generally not comment further until the inquiries or investigation is complete.”
In a December statement, TikTok said its use of Pixel trackers, commonly deployed by marketers to help them target users with advertising, is compliant with Australian privacy laws. The platform said it also relied on data shared by clients using the tool, so long as they have secured prerequisite permissions.
“As we have said publicly on many occasions, Australian user data is encrypted and stored in world-class data centres in the US and Singapore,” the company said.
