August 1, 2023
The Senate Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media has today presented a bipartisan report with 17 recommendations to expose covert disinformation campaigns targeting Australian social media users orchestrated by authoritarian regimes.
Social media platforms are the new town square. They are the place where news is first reported, contentious issues are debated, consensus is formed, and public policy decisions are shaped. The health of these forums directly affects the health of our democracies. Foreign authoritarian states know this. They do not permit open and free debates on their own social media platforms. They use ours as a vector for their clandestine information operations to shape our decision-making in their national interest and contrary to ours. Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence has made their job easier and demonstrates the need for urgent action to ensure Australia stays ahead of the threat.
Where authoritarian regimes rely on secrecy and deception to advance their national interests on social media, Australia should rely on openness and transparency to secure our own. That’s why the committee has recommended a range of enforceable transparency standards to both expose the clandestine conduct of authoritarian regimes online, and to empower and protect the freedoms of Australian social media users, recognising that not all social media platforms are the same.
The committee recognised the unique national security risks posed by social media companies like TikTok and WeChat, whose parent companies ByteDance and Tencent and the majority of their employees are irrefutably headquartered in authoritarian countries like China, and are therefore beholden to China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law. Throughout the inquiry, authoritarian-based companies were reluctant to cooperate with Australian parliamentary process. WeChat repeatedly refused to participate in public hearings on the basis that, despite its significant online presence, it does not have a physical presence in Australia.To keep companies like WeChat accountable to our laws, the committee recommends social media companies operating in Australia must have a physical presence within Australia’s legal jurisdiction. The government should seek advice on banning WeChat from government devices given its data security and foreign interference risks.
After initial reluctance to appear before the committee,TikTok engaged in a determined effort to obfuscate and avoid answering basic questions about the platform, its parent company, and its relationship to the Chinese Communist Party. Companies that repeatedly fail to meet minimum transparency requirements should be fined and, as a last resort, may be banned by the Minister for Home Affairs, with appropriate oversight mechanisms in place. Should the US Government take action to force ByteDance to divest ownership of TikTok to another company that is not beholden to the Chinese Communist Party, Australia should look to do the same.
Platforms like TikTok and WeChat that are subject to the control of authoritarian regimes illustrate the broader cyber security risk to sensitive government information. To mitigate this risk, the Minister for Home Affairs should require entities designated as Systems of National Significance under the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act 2018 to ban these applications on work-issued devices. Government contractors’ devices with access to Australian Government data should also be required to ban high-risk apps like TikTok and WeChat.
The committee was also concerned with the serious risk of Western social media companies being weaponised by authoritarian regimes to deliberately deceive users, target dissidents and fuel social discord. Social media companies should be required to proactively label state affiliated media entities, and any content censored at the direction of a government should be publicly disclosed. Platforms should be open to independent external researchers who can identify, investigate and attribute coordinated inauthentic behaviour. The access to user data facilitated by these platforms, especially to employees based in authoritarian countries, must be disclosed. Amended Magnitsky sanctions, bolstered enforcement of espionage and foreign interference offences and support for diaspora communities targeted by transnational repression all need to be part of a package of reforms to raise the costs of this malign behaviour.
Of course, social media companies do not need to wait for the government legislate transparency requirements. They can proactively undertake this important task now, as some of them are already doing. With a concerted joint effort by government, the private sector and civil society, we can ensure Australia’s way of life prevails.
A full copy of the Senate Committee report and recommendations can be found here.
