Zoe McKenzie (Flinders, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Concerns with TikTok are well known. Today TikTok is banned on most government issued devices at both the national and state level in the United States. It is also banned on government devices in the UK, New Zealand, Canada, the European Union bureaucracy and parliament and, indeed, in Denmark. Increasingly it's not just banned on devices but also blocked by wi-fi networks so it cannot even be accessed by a personal device in some sensitive locations. Dozens of United States universities and schools have banned TikTok access from their local wi-fi networks. But it is not yet banned on government issued devices in Australia. Indeed, it is not banned anywhere in Australia.

It is believed that TikTok has more than seven million users in Australia. Owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company, it is subject to the laws of all Chinese resident companies, which includes the obligation to share information with the Chinese government contained in China's 2017 national intelligence law. We know that Australian data can be accessed in China, because TikTok admitted as much in a letter to shadow minister for cybersecurity Senator James Paterson almost 12 months ago.

Many are concerned about the risk posed by an app which does the following: TikTok checks the location of the device at least once an hour, and that location is not just Australia but a specific street location in a specific suburb in a specific city; it continuously requests access to contacts, even if the user originally denies that access; it maps all of the device's running applications and, indeed, all installed applications; it records every keystroke made within the app's browser; and it accesses the device's calendar and retrieves a list of everything available in any external storage folder. Felix Krause, a privacy and data security researcher, recently discovered that TikTok is running code that tracks and captures every single keystroke while you're in the browser. That means any searched term—and indeed passwords and credit card information—may be gleaned.

Those who've studied the app, its ownership and the known accessing of the data of various individuals, including journalists in the United States, describe TikTok in stark terms. Republican congressman Michael McCaul, chair of the US congressional committee on foreign affairs, described TikTok as 'a spy balloon in your phone'. It's important to look carefully at examples of TikTok's influence.

I cite the case of TikTok's behaviour when Russia invaded Ukraine. In a recent podcast interview, Mark Faddoul explained that, overnight, TikTok had created basically a separate version of itself just for Russia. How did they do this? They put in place an upload ban, meaning that people could not post new content at all and in particular they could not post content regarding the war that was unfolding in front of them. All international content was made inaccessible, so people on TikTok in Russia couldn't see the world's outrage at the war, nor any level of local resistance to it. However, despite that upload ban, certain Russian accounts were still able to continue to post, and that which was published overwhelmingly supported the pro-Kremlin content.

A similar set of observations and concerns were raised in relation to France's presidential elections, when divisive candidates got far greater airplay even though they got far fewer votes. Roughly 30 per cent of airplay was devoted to divisive candidates who got no more than seven per cent at the ballot box.

Social media and digital data expert Tristan Harris wrote of TikTok last September:

Imagine it's the Cold War in the 1960s, and imagine the Soviet Union put itself into position to run television programming for the entire western world, of more than a billion TV viewers. We would've never, in the west, let that happen during the Cold War. So while this might sound like science fiction, this is actually the world we're living in right now with TikTok being influenced by the Chinese Communist Party. TikTok is projected to have 1.8 billion users by the end of 2022. And a Pew research study just showed that TikTok is the most popular app for teens in the United States, who now spend more time watching and posting to TikTok than YouTube.

For the better part of a year, the coalition has been calling on the Albanese government to act on the national security risks associated with TikTok. It is not safe enough to be on the devices of any of our Five Eyes partners. I ask: why on earth does this government think it is safe enough here?

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