September 12, 2022
And on the sixth day of the Albanese ministry, TikTok began to lobby.
It didn’t take long for the beleaguered social media app to try to get on the front foot with the new government, with TikTok’s director of public policy Australia Brent Thomas writing to Home Affairs and cybersecurity minister Clare O’Neil on June 6, less than a week after she was sworn in to her new gig.
The June 6 letter from Thomas to the new government, the particular contents of which remain unknown, was revealed as part of questions on notice to the minister asked by Liberal senator James Paterson, the opposition spokesman for cybersecurity and countering foreign interference.
Paterson asked O’Neil to outline a timeline of any communications between TikTok, it’s lobbyists, and the new government.
But if the disappearance of O’Neil from the platform, revealed by Lachlan Murdoch’s new besties Crikey, is anything to go by, TikTok has a hard road ahead of it.
Little would Thomas have known that a new firestorm would soon engulf TikTok in Australia, and globally.
On June 17, BuzzFeed US published an investigation based on explosive leaked audio from 80 internal TikTok meetings that showed US user data was being accessed repeatedly from mainland China.
By July 13, TikTok’s Thomas was forced to admit in a letter to Paterson, obtained by the Financial Review, that TikTok employees around the world, including in China, can access certain data of millions of Australian users as well.
TikTok in 2020 was at pains to tell our parliamentarians that Australian user data was stored in Singapore and the US. It failed to mention its China-based employees could gain access to the data – although it gave assurances it had strict protocols in place when it admitted this in July this year.
On July 18, 2022, the Financial Review revealed the TikTok app checks a user’s device location at least once an hour, maps all a device’s installed apps, and continues to annoy a user to access contacts even if originally rejected.
So why is this important? What’s different from every other technology giant such as Facebook and Google which scoop up way more data than they should?
It all comes down to TikTok’s ultimate ownership. TikTok Australia is owned by TikTok Ltd, which is registered in the Cayman Islands. TikTok Ltd is owned by ByteDance Ltd, a Chinese multinational company based in Beijing and domiciled in the Cayman Islands.
In 2017, China passed its National Intelligence Law, which requires organisations and citizens to “support, assist and co-operate with the state intelligence work”.
Multiple experts agree that this legislation means no Chinese company can refuse a request from the Chinese Communist Party, to the point where leadership within the organisation may not even be aware of the request.
It’s no wonder that TikTok’s Thomas had written yet another letter to the minister on July 21, 2022. Wonder what that was about?
As debate rages in the US, Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, credited for blowing up the WeWork IPO in 2019, has taken a glib view of TikTok over the weekend.
“If you believe as I do that there is no separation between the CCP and a Chinese company, who can ‘disappear’ a CEO for four weeks; if you believe the CCP has a vested interest in diminishing our standing globally, and then you also acknowledge that people under the age of 18 are spending more time on TikTok than they’re spending on every streaming network combined, are we comfortable – are we down with an organisation that wants to undermine America – controlling the media our children see? It should be banned, full stop.”
The concern about content censoring on TikTok extends even to Australia. In mid-2020, the Financial Review revealed popular Indigenous Australian and New Zealand creators accusing TikTok of blocking their accounts, and shadow-banning, when speaking out about Black Lives Matters issues.
It looks as though Thomas’ efforts have done little to move O’Neil, who ordered her department to investigate the Chinese-owned social media giant’s data harvesting.
On August 5, the department of Home Affairs, “as part of ongoing engagement with social media companies”, requested a meeting with TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance.
By August 17, the department responded to Thomas’ two letters.
Last week, the chief executive of German publishing giant Axel Springer, Mathias Döpfner, claimed TikTok was “a tool of espionage”.
“I think that we should just have this kind of self-respect, and that is why I concretely think TikTok should be banned in every democracy. I just think that it is insane not to do that,” he said.
TikTok has now moved its private campaign into the public light ... with some well targeted advertising for our nation’s leaders leaving Canberra to fly home to their constituents, throwing up a giant billboard at the airport after a week of newspaper and radio ads promising us it’s up to scratch with privacy.
A pity for TikTok that privacy and security experts aren’t buying it.
