April 24, 2024
OLIVER PETERSON: Senator James Paterson, good afternoon.
JAMES PATERSON: Good to be with you, Oly.
PETERSON: We've spoken about this before, Senator, but are you surprised it has passed the US Senate?
PATERSON: No Oly, I thought this was always going to happen at some point, because the American system recognises that TikTok is a threat to their national security, and it's a threat to our national security, too. What is remarkable about the vote in the Senate overnight and the vote in the House of Representatives last week, is how bipartisan it was. 79 senators out of 100 voted in favour of this legislation. And in the House, 350 out of about 400 voted in favour. So overwhelmingly bipartisan consensus between Democrats and Republicans that we have got to try and make TikTok safe, by removing the Chinese Communist Party's control over it.
PETERSON: Is there any appetite for something similar here in Australia?
PATERSON: Well, I'm calling on the Albanese government to act, and act quickly because if they don't, they'll be two versions of TikTok. There'll be a version of TikTok in America, which is safe because it's not controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. And there'll be a dangerous version of TikTok available everywhere else in the world, including Australia, which is ultimately beholden to a foreign authoritarian government. And that means that data is at risk, and it means we're exposed to foreign interference from an authoritarian government.
PETERSON: So Coalition policy going forward, Senator, will be for either TikTok to be sold or to ban it here in Australia?
PATERSON: I think the best solution is the sale to divest it from its parent company ByteDance, severing that link with the Chinese Communist Party. If we have to have a ban on the table to force them to comply with that, well that’s the decision Americans have made, and I think they will comply with it, because TikTok is a valuable business. ByteDance can sell it and get a hell of a payday, and it can continue to operate freely in the United States and everywhere else in the world.
PETERSON: What are your main concerns with TikTok? What are you particularly worried about, that data being in the hands of the Chinese Communist government?
PATERSON: So two things. Firstly, the 2017 national intelligence law in China, article seven requires all Chinese citizens and companies to assist the work of Chinese intelligence agencies and to keep that cooperation secret. So a ByteDance or Tik Tok employee working in China who has access to your data or mine from this app, could be compelled to hand it over to China's intelligence agencies and we would never know about that. That's a real problem, because China is our number one source of espionage and foreign interference risk, and also state backed cyberattacks. So that's a very powerful data set that they can use against us. The other danger, of course, is foreign interference. They can pump disinformation into our democracy, and we would be none the wiser. If a Chinese company proposed to buy a television station today, there's no way the Foreign Investment Review Board would approve it. And yet people spend a lot more time on TikTok, and they get a lot more of the news from TikTok today, particularly young people, than they do watching television. And that is a real danger to our democracy.
PETERSON: Okay, we've got this situation at the moment as well in regards to what is being put on the platform of X, formerly Twitter, Elon Musk's platform. Where do you stand on this, Senator? Because there's a big argument about freedom of speech now versus censoring some of that violent content on X. What's your opinion?
PATERSON: Well, in government, the Coalition established the eSafety commissioner's office and gave them power to take down abhorrent violent material. We did that in the wake of the Christchurch massacre, where a terrorist broadcasted live his murder of many innocent people in New Zealand. And everyone agreed that kind of content, plus content like ISIS beheading videos, couldn't be broadcast on a television programme or a radio program. So it shouldn't be available on the internet, particularly for young people. So we do support the eSafety commissioner taking that content offline for Australians. But we are only one country. It's not our job to police the global internet, and I think it is overreach to suggest that these things can't be accessible in other countries. That's for them to decide. If they don't want it in their countries, they should pass laws like we have. It's not up to us to tell them.
PETERSON: Okay, so the church attack last week is labeled terrorism there in Sydney, but the Bondi Junction attack is not. Both of the images or the vision that you can find online. It's pretty confronting though, isn't it?
PATERSON: That's right. And it's not actually relevant whether it's a terrorist attack or not. It's just relevant whether it is abhorrent violent material. So whether it is a massacre or a murder or terrorist attack, any violent imagery, real violent imagery, can't be broadcast without it being censored appropriately. And that's what an appropriate media organisation does, as you would if you put it on your website. So you shouldn't be able to tweet about it, without that kind of protection as well.
PETERSON: So you support the ideas and there's bipartisan support between Coalition and the government in regards to forcing the hand of the social media platforms to remove this violent or this abhorrent content.
PATERSON: Well, we've been calling for some time for the government to go one step further and that is to have mandatory age verification on social media platforms, because while the social media platforms, some of them have a policy that you can't have a Twitter account or an Instagram account if you're under 13, we know they don't enforce it and children are all over these platforms, and it's particularly dangerous if kids can access content like that on these platforms. So the government has been stalling on this, has refused an eSafety commissioner recommendation to do it to protect our kids online.
PETERSON: Senator, thanks for your time today.
PATERSON: Thanks Oly.
ENDS
