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March 18, 2024
The federal opposition wants Australia to emulate the United States in its bid to force the Chinese tech giant that owns TikTok to divest its US business.
Shadow home affairs spokesman James Paterson says the plan isn't to stop the use of the social media platform in Australia but to "make TikTok safe by removing the influence of the Chinese Communist Party".
Senator Paterson said Australia should be treating Chinese instant messaging app WeChat in the same manner.
"The end that I hope for is that Australians can continue to use TikTok but just without the risk that their data is abused, and without ... the Chinese Communist Party putting its thumb on the algorithm to pump disinformation into our democracy," he told reporters on Sunday.
Despite his security concerns, Senator Paterson defended the Liberal Party's right to have an official account on the social media platform and said it was okay for political parties to use it as long as they were "mitigating risks".
The short-form video app is owned by Chinese company ByteDance and is one of the fastest growing platforms in the world, with more than 170 million users in the US and 8.5 million Australian users.
But last week the US House of Representatives passed a bill that would give ByteDance six months to divest from the app and sell to a company that is not based in China. A failure to divest in time would effectively result in a ban on the app across the US.
