July 10, 2023
Chinese-owned messaging app WeChat has been accused of showing contempt for federal parliament by defying repeated requests to appear before a parliamentary inquiry that is weighing whether to recommend banning the app from use in Australia because of foreign interference concerns.
Executives from social media giants TikTok, Google, Twitter and LinkedIn have all agreed to appear at the final public hearings of the Senate select committee on foreign interference through social media in Parliament House on Tuesday.
Representatives from Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, will also appear at the hearings, leaving WeChat as the only company refusing multiple invitations to give evidence.
Around 1 million people in Australia – including almost half the Chinese diaspora – are believed to use WeChat, which has been described as “China’s app for everything”.
Committee chair James Paterson wrote to WeChat’s Shenzhen-based parent company Tencent last week to say the committee was likely to take a dim view of the app if it declines to make its case publicly to parliament.
“Some experts who have testified before the committee have argued that banning WeChat should be an option considered to protect Australian users from infringement on their freedoms,” Paterson wrote in the letter to Tencent’s head of corporate affairs Elizabeth Byun.
“If WeChat continues to refuse to appear before the committee, we will inevitably draw conclusions about your willingness to co-operate with Australian law and make recommendations accordingly.”
The committee is due to deliver its recommendations on August 1.
Forty-seven per cent of Chinese-Australians use WeChat, only slightly behind Facebook with 49 per cent, according to research by the Lowy Institute.
Paterson, the opposition home affairs spokesman, wrote: “I understand WeChat has around one million users in Australia, and I recognise it is an essential tool for communication for Australians with Chinese heritage.
“But compelling evidence has been put to the committee that WeChat functions as a ‘narrative machine’ for the Chinese Communist Party, and the committee has heard disturbing allegations that WeChat has been used to intimidate and harass Chinese-Australian human rights activists and their families overseas in an apparent campaign to stifle their freedom of expression.”
Paterson said WeChat and its parent company were “showing contempt for the parliament of Australia” and that “they have no excuse not to front up”.
“This is a company with many questions to answer about how it censors and surveils its users and its relationship with the Chinese Communist Party,” he said.
“There is still time for them to reconsider and I urge them to do so.
The Senate can compel witnesses to appear at parliamentary committees, but this power does not apply to WeChat because, unlike other tech giants, it is not believed to have any Australian-based employees.
A Tencent spokesman said: “WeChat takes compliance seriously in all markets in which we operate.
“We look forward to continuing to engage with stakeholders in Australia.”
Seth Kaplan, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, told the committee in April that WeChat posed a more profound national security threat than TikTok, despite the heavy focus on the popular video-sharing app.
“Everything that we fear about what TikTok may become already is occurring on WeChat,” Kaplan said.
Kaplan said the app should be banned in its current form as it forms part of Beijing’s mass surveillance network and can be used to spy on and influence Chinese communities around the world.
Fergus Ryan, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s International Cyber Policy Centre, said: “I don’t think that a ban of WeChat or TikTok should ever be taken off the table.”
In a submission to the inquiry, WeChat said the app is designed for users outside China and is not governed by Chinese law.
Parent company Tencent has previously said that WeChat allows users to privately communicate with each other, that no content is pushed to users and that Tencent exercises no editorial control over what users see.
Two academics said in a submission that banning WeChat risked causing “emotional, psychological and practical harm” to the country’s large and growing Chinese-speaking community.
“WeChat is a necessity, not a choice for many Chinese Australians,” University of Technology Sydney professor Wanning Sun and RMIT professor Haiqing Yu said.
“Banning WeChat brings more damage than benefit to our democracy, since it is likely to erode rather than encourage faith in the strength of our democracy and it is likely to infringe on citizens’ rights to communicate on social media platforms.”
