August 6, 2023
AMANDA STOKER: This week, the Senate Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media delivered a report determining that our country is dangerously exposed to cyber-enabled foreign interference. Now, foreign interference is a term that gets bandied about, but it's really serious. It consists of malign actions by foreign governments or foreign actors doing so with the impetus of those governments designed to sow discord, manipulate public discourse, discredit the electoral system, bias the development of policy, or disrupt the market for the purpose of undermining the interests of Australia or its allies. To help us understand the nature of the threat and the action Australia needs to take to address it, I'm pleased to welcome Senator James Paterson, Shadow Minister for Home Affairs and Cyber Security to the show. Senator Paterson, welcome. What's the nature of the risk that the committee has observed through its deliberations?
JAMES PATERSON: Thank you for having me, Amanda. Well, the committee was very sobered by the risks that we encountered in the evidence of this committee. It is a very serious risk and a risk to our democracy, because whether we like it or not, social media platforms have become the public square of our democracies. It's where news is broken, where issues are debated, and where decisions effectively are shaped and then made. And authoritarian states recognise this. It's why they don't permit these platforms in their countries and why they try and use ours as a point of weakness, as a vector to interfere. And so we thought the health of these forums impacts directly on the health of our democracy. We can't just allow foreign governments, whether they do so through a Western headquartered social media platform by weaponising the algorithms or whether they do so
through an authoritarian headquartered platform by directly influencing them, should be allowed to have free rein and intervening in our democracy. Otherwise, we'll find ourselves having our decisions made for us, by others.
STOKER: Help me understand and help my viewers understand exactly what the endgame is here. What are foreign governments trying to achieve by this conduct?
PATERSON: Well, if we think about Australia and our region, the Indo-Pacific, where many strategists warn there is a risk of a state-on-state conflict within the next five years. The thing that always precedes a real war is an information war. And states try and shape the choices in advance that other states make to their favour. So in the case of a potential conflict in our region, a potential adversary might be trying to get Australia out of participating in such a conflict. And so what they try and do is influence our decision making, influence our public opinion, try and get our politicians to have a constrained environment in which to make a decision and therefore make a choice that favours them instead of us. And if we let it happen, we will find ourselves waking up when it's too late to have done something about it. It's really important that we get on the front foot now, even a long time away from potential conflict to address this before it becomes a really serious problem.
STOKER: Yeah, too right. What recommendations did the committee make in its report?
PATERSON: The committee was really informed by the principle of transparency as opposed to censorship. We've seen other proposals out there like the government's misinformation law, which would be using censorship to solve this problem. But we want to use transparency to solve this problem. We want the platforms to be transparent about the content that's on there. For example, state affiliated entities, whether it's RT, Russia Today, or Xinhua, that are state-affiliated should be labelled as such so that users can make informed choices about the information they receive from it. And secondly, the platforms themselves must be transparent about how they operate when they're censoring or de-platforming content. They should be open and honest about it. They should make themselves open to independent researchers and third parties to study the algorithm and the other activity that occurs in the platform. Particularly the coordinated, inauthentic account, the bot accounts, that are being put on there to try and game the algorithm to drive content to you and me that's not organic, that's not real but that's been driven by the interests of a nation state. And we think if the platforms abide by that transparency, then we'll have a much healthier and much more open public debate that'll be much better informed. But if they don't, then unfortunately, we will find ourselves being influenced by people that we don't even know are trying to influence us.
STOKER: CCP-controlled newspaper The Global Times has put forward its point of view on how the government should respond to this report. What do you make of the really robust response the Chinese have given by way of pushback to this report's recommendations?
PATERSON: Yes, well in that article in The Global Times, they said that if Australia was to in our own national interest, decide to ban, for example, TikTok or WeChat either on
government devices or more widely for, say, critical infrastructure operators or government contractors, that that would damage the bilateral relationship in the same way that it did when we banned Huawei from our 5G network. Well, first of all, I was a bit bemused by that because TikTok throughout the inquiry insisted that they were not a Chinese company. So if that's true, why would the Chinese government be objecting to any action taken against TikTok? I think that does prove the point they are a Chinese company. But secondly, I really hope that the Albanese government is not influenced by these kind of threats and this kind of rhetoric. We cannot allow decisions in our national interest and that go to our core of our national security to be dictated to by a foreign government, certainly not a foreign authoritarian government. And so, it's really important that we make these decisions informed by this bipartisan report, not in any way intimidated or influenced by the Chinese government or its threats.
STOKER: There is irony in Chinese pushback when they would never allow a foreign government controlled social media platform to be disseminated and used within China's territorial boundaries. It's fascinating. Has the government committed to implement the recommendations of the committee?
PATERSON: Well, that's exactly right, Amanda. The Chinese government doesn't permit any Western social media platforms at all. So, it is certainly hypocritical for them to criticise us if we chose to do the same. I have no commitment from the Government yet that they will implement these recommendations, but I really hope they do because it was a bipartisan report. It was conducted in a bipartisan manner. We worked very well across the aisle. There was very little areas of disagreement when we came to concluding the report. So I really hope that that spirit is taken up by the government itself and that it puts those plans into action. And if they did so, Australia would again be leading the world. We led the world with me with combating more traditional forms of foreign interference that's now being taken up by the UK and Canada. If we did, this would be leading the world on cyber enabled foreign interference and we'd be setting a template for the rest of democracies to follow.
STOKER: Well, I hope that bipartisanship continues. We'll keep in touch with you on how the government is progressing on implementation. Senator Paterson, thank you very much for your time.
PATERSON: Thanks, Amanda.
ENDS
