April 24, 2024
MEDIA RELEASE
Tuesday 24 April 2024
ALBANESE GOVERNMENT MUST ACT NOW TO MAKE TIKTOK SAFER
The Coalition welcomes the passage of legislation through the US Congress forcing ByteDance to divest its ownership of TikTok. ByteDance is a social media giant headquartered in Beijing and ultimately beholden to the Chinese Communist Party(CCP).
President Biden has already stated he will sign this law to make TikTok safer for Americans. The Albanese government must do the same to make TikTok safer for Australians, or we risk being left behind.
In April 2023,the Albanese government acted belatedly in banning TikTok from all Commonwealth-issued work devices after similar bans by the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and the European Union among many others.
The Coalition had been calling for action to better protect Australians since July 2022 when TikTok admitted that Australian user data was accessible in mainland China. The government must now go further to safeguard the 8.5 million Australians who use TikTok every day.
The national security risks associated with TikTok are clear. The first is that the CCP can compel ByteDance and TikTok employees to provide access to user data under China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law, which requires all organisations and individuals to secretly cooperate with China’s intelligence services. The Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media last year found that TikTok’s China-based employees can, and have, accessed Australian user data, and that this access is not contingent on where that data is stored.
The second issue is that TikTok’s algorithm can be exploited to interfere in our democracy at the behest of the CCP. Independent experts have demonstrated how TikTok has suppressed content on the platform sensitive to the CCP, such as the human rights abuses in Xinjiang. More recent evidence has emerged demonstrating that the TikTok algorithm serves far more pro-Hamas content than pro-Israel content compared to any other social media platform, stoking divisions in our community.
It is long past time the government got serious about the threat of cyber-enabled espionage and foreign interference and took strong action to safeguard our democracy against this pernicious threat, as the US Congress has now done.
The Coalition stands ready to work with the Albanese government to make TikTok safer for all Australians by removing the Chinese Communist Party’s control over the app.
ENDS
