Technically, it’s a fallacy to judge an idea on the metric of just who is endorsing it. Still, there are some actors who are so resolutely wrong that it’s a pretty safe bet that anything they like is a very bad thing indeed. One such bad actor is China.
And China just loves Anthony Albanese’s proposed Ministry of Truth.
Chinese-linked social media platform TikTok has indicated it is supportive of the Albanese government’s misinformation legislation, saying the app was “very open to the feedback from those regulators” and “transparency is something that we welcome”.
The Australian
“Transparency”, of course, being the first word one tends to think of in relation to the Chinese communist regime.
“Chinese-linked” is a misleading euphemism. TikTok is Chinese-owned — meaning that, ultimately, it’s overseen by the Chinese Communist Party, like all large Chinese companies.
In what appears to be a first, a former employee of ByteDance, TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, has outlined specific claims that the Chinese Communist Party accessed the data of TikTok users on a broad scale, and for political purposes.
In a court filing this week, the former employee of ByteDance, Yintao Yu, alleged that the CCP spied on pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong in 2018 by using “backdoor” access to TikTok to identify and monitor the activists’ locations and communications.
Multiple security experts told CNN that this appears to be the first reported allegation of the CCP accessing actual TikTok user data.
CNN
So much for “transparency”, then.
But, still, why wouldn’t the Chinese Communist Party be all for laws like this:
Last week, the Albanese government released a Bill gifting itself and Big Tech new powers to censor information it doesn’t want online.
As is the standard script for today’s would-be censors, the totalitarian demand to control information is couched in lies about “safety”.
According to the Minister for Communications:
‘Mis and disinformation sows division within the community undermines trust and can threaten public health and safety.’
Would that include the mis- and disinformation, nay, blatant lies told by governments?
Albanese has exempted anything from his own government or the media from being considered ‘misinformation’.
Yet anything said in response to the government by the Opposition or another political party, or by any member of the public, can be considered misinformation and censored.
We’ve been seeing that in action, in spades, recently.
For example, if a Minister of the government made a clearly deceptive claim such as that the Voice would never campaign to change the date of Australia Day, and the media uncritically published stories about this on social media, that can’t be considered misinformation. But if you comment on that post and point out the Voice would be free to lobby government on any matter it chooses and that some of the government’s top advisers on the Voice have been denouncing Australia Day and calling to change the date for years, you may well find your post tagged as misinformation.
The lying narrative chorused by the horking seals of the chattering classes is that it isn’t censorship, because the government isn’t going to personally remove stuff from social media. We already saw that bareface lie exposed, when it was revealed that government bureaucrats had thousands of social media posts removed during the pandemic.
The inevitable result of the Labor government threatening massive fines against social media if they don’t censor content further is that those companies will block content and debates they know left-wing governments don’t like. Albanese’s government has cunningly drafted its legislation to ensure that when your posts are censored or your account is banned as a result of his laws, there will be no right of appeal to the government, and they’ll be able to blame the social media platforms […]
The Albanese government is choosing the path of censorship and suppression. Government that appoints itself and fellow elites as the arbiters of truth is the worst possible response – one that authoritarian regimes have chosen since the beginning of recorded history.
Spectator Australia
No wonder Beijing thinks it’s such a great idea.