March 14, 2024
TOM ELLIOTT: The American government, well specifically the Congress, which is the lower house of the American government, is looking like it wants to ban TikTok. Should Australia do the same thing? Our next guest is a Victorian Liberal Senator, he's shadow Home Affairs spokesperson, James Paterson good morning.
JAMES PATERSON: Good to be with you, Tom.
ELLIOTT: Why are the Americans looking at banning TikTok? What is it about it that they don't like?
PATERSON: Because TikTok is a serious national security threat to America, and it is for Australia, too. There are two main risks posed by TikTok. The first is the way that they abuse the data of their clients, their customers, who use the application. And the second is the way that the application is used to interfere in our democracy at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party.
ELLIOTT: Well, firstly, the data, I mean going all the social media platforms do various things with their users’ data. What does TikTok do that's worse than, say, Facebook, for example?
PATERSON: Well, it was only a year ago that TikTok was accused of using their application to spy on a journalist who wrote critical articles of them and to try and identify the sources of those articles. TikTok initially said that they would never do that, and they said in fact, it wasn't technically possible to do so on the app. But several months later, they had to admit that, in fact, that had happened on the app and that the employees involved had been fired from the company. Now, a company that's prepared to use its app to spy on journalists is prepared to do a lot of other things as well. And that's why the Australian government sensibly eventually followed our other allies in banning it from all government devices. But that risk is still present for all individual Australian users, of which we think there's about 8 million.
ELLIOTT: So there's the misuse of individuals data, of which there are millions. As in TikTok is very popular and what was the second reason that the Americans want to ban it?
PATERSON: The second reason is that we know that the Chinese Communist Party has used TikTok to manipulate information in our democracies, to pump disinformation to our democracies. There's a couple of good examples of these. The first is that content which is critical of the Chinese Communist Party is suppressed and has been suppressed on the platform. For example, independent researchers have found if you search for terms like Xinjiang or Hong Kong or Taiwan on the platform, you find overwhelmingly positive content on the platform, that praises the Chinese Communist Party, in contravention of what we know is happening in those places. The second is that, disinformation which is harmful to Western democracies, for example, pro-Hamas content, is far more prevalent on the TikTok platform than any other platform. And again, independent research researchers to have demonstrated that it is dozens and sometimes hundreds of times more likely to have that content on there. Now, when that was exposed, TikTok's response was to shut down the research tool that allowed that to be exposed.
ELLIOTT: Right. Now, I remember back when Donald Trump was elected in, 2016 and came to power early 2017, a lot of people said, oh, you know, the Russians interfered. And that's the only reason Trump got elected. Do we worry that the Chinese will do the same thing? I don't know who they want elected or not, whether they'll keep Albanese in power or something like that?
PATERSON: So the U.S. intelligence community published an assessment last week which suggests that the Chinese Communist Party did use TikTok to attempt to intervene in the most recent round of U.S. congressional elections about two years ago. And there's no reason to think why they wouldn't do that, because we know that they do it in other platforms. Facebook, for example, has shut down multiple Chinese foreign interference networks targeting Western nations and democracies in our elections. So if they're using Facebook, which is headquartered in the United States and not controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, why wouldn't they use a platform which they directly control through the parent company, ByteDance?
ELLIOTT: So do you think we should ban it here in Australia.
PATERSON: Well the United States actually isn't banning it. What they're doing is passing legislation which requires ByteDance to sell TikTok. What that would do is it would separate TikTok from the Chinese Communist Party and allow it to continue to operate in the United States just owned by another company. I think we should do the same here in Australia.
ELLIOTT: But you can't have multiple versions of TikTok owned by different groups around the world, can you? I mean, that just won't work?
PATERSON: Well, that's the risk that I think we run the United States acts on this and we don't. I think you'll have the US TikTok, and you'll have a TikTok everywhere else in the world and the US TikTok will be free of Chinese government influence, but the rest of the TikTok in the world, including Australia, will continue to be controlled by the China's Communist Party. So we need to act too. We need the Albanese government to legislate
to make sure we're part of this solution and we're protected from that foreign government influence.
ELLIOTT: Dare I ask are you on TikTok?
PATERSON: No, I'm absolutely not.
ELLIOTT: I am I'm afraid. James Paterson there, Victorian Liberal Senator and shadow Home Affairs spokesperson.
ENDS
