Opinion
When ASIO chief Mike Burgess refused to name the politician he accused of what amounted to treason, all eyes turned to the Labor party. This is, after all, the party which took literal shopping bags of cash from CCP-linked “donors”. During the 2023 federal election, it emerged that China was bankrolling Labor candidates.
The CCP are getting their money’s worth. PM Anthony Albanese is refusing to ban Chinese-owned spy app TikTok, despite India already doing so, and the US Congress voting by a landslide to do the same.
The House of Representatives passed a bill on Wednesday that would require the TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the social media platform or face a total ban in the United States.
The vote was a landslide, with 352 Congress members voting in favor and only 65 against. The bill, which was fast-tracked to a vote after being unanimously approved by a committee last week, gives China-based ByteDance 165 days to divest from TikTok. If it did not, app stores including the Apple App store and Google Play would be legally barred from hosting TikTok or providing web hosting services to ByteDance-controlled applications.
At issue is that the Chinese-based (and therefore CCP-overseen) company is able collect sensitive data and politically censor content. TikTok claims that it does not and would not share US user data with the Chinese government.
But this would be an obvious breach of Chinese laws which “compel Chinese businesses and citizens… to support and facilitate China’s government access to the collection, transmission and storage of data”. Even more alarmingly, Chinese laws demand vulnerabilities in software and mobile applications — including TikTok — “can provide location and other data to the Chinese government”.
By demanding the Chinese company sell the app, the bill gives it a chance to remove itself from CCP oversight. However, why anyone would still trust it is anyone’s guess.
Authors of the bill have argued it does not constitute a ban, as it gives ByteDance the opportunity to sell TikTok and avoid being blocked in the US. Representative Mike Gallagher, the Republican chairman of the House select China committee, and Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, the panel’s top Democrat, introduced legislation to address national security concerns posed by Chinese ownership of the app.
“TikTok could live on and people could do whatever they want on it provided there is that separation,” Gallagher said, urging US ByteDance investors to support a sale. “It is not a ban – think of this as a surgery designed to remove the tumor and thereby save the patient in the process.”
The Guardian
Donald Trump first proposed banning the app in 2020, a policy the Biden administration overturned. Now, Joe Biden supports the ban passed by Congress, while Trump is arguing that TikTok is the lesser evil.
Trump explained his new opposition in an interview with CNBC on Monday, saying that despite the possible security risk, he opposed a ban because it meant users would move to another platform that he considered more dangerous.
“There’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok. But the thing I don’t like is that without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people along with a lot of the media,” he said.
President Biden’s campaign posts regularly on TikTok, but the White House has said if a bill is sent to his desk he’ll sign it.
NPR
The bill will almost certainly face a First Amendment challenge in the US, but there’s nothing like that stopping the Albanese government from going right ahead and banning it. Just don’t expect China’s little mate in Australia to do it.
Opposition spokesperson for home affairs and cyber security James Paterson says the government “must take action” to combat the threat of TikTok, following the passage of a bill through the US House of Representatives that would ban TikTok.
“TikTok is a national security threat for Australia for the same reason it’s a national security threat to the United States,” Senator Paterson said on Sky News.
“Number one, they abuse the data of their users, and number two, they use the app to interfere in our democracy by pumping it full of disinformation and by censoring things which are critical of the Chinese Communist Party.”
The Australian
Neither of which are obviously of much concern to the Albanese government.