Potential Australian TikTok Ban Rears Its Head Again

The Senate Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media has brought TikTok back into the legislative firing line by recommending that Australia should follow America’s lead by banning the app.

The committee said that companies based in “authoritarian countries demonstrated their reluctance” to cooperate with the Australian government. Despite the protestations of TikTok and ByteDance, the committee said that the company is “irrefutably headquartered in and run from countries like China.”

The committee is set to release its final report later this month but this interim update is already making grim reading for the short-form video app.

Chaired by Liberal senator James Paterson, the committee also said that TikTok had “engaged in a determined effort to obfuscate and avoid answering the most basic questions” about the app, its parent company and any ties it has to the Chinese Communist Party.

That obfuscation, according to the committee, demonstrates that TikTok has “repeatedly” failed to meet the “minimum transparency requirements” and should be fined or potentially banned.

“Should the United States Government take action to force ByteDance to divest ownership of TikTok to another company that is not beholden to the Chinese Communist Party, the committee finds that Australia should consider similar requirements in Australia,” it added.

Ella Woods-Joyce, TikTok’s director of public policy AUNZ, said:

“While we disagree with many of the characterisations and statements made regarding TikTok, on our initial reading, we welcome the fact that the Committee has not recommended a ban. We are also encouraged that recommendations largely appear to apply equally to all platforms. TikTok remains committed to continuing an open and transparent dialogue with all levels of Australian Government.”

In the US, a number of Republican-led states have issued bans on TikTok on government-issued devices and Montana even issued a blanket ban on the app on all devices in May — regardless of whether they’re government-issued or private.

In April, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese signed off on a law banning TikTok from all government-issued devices, bringing Australia into line with the other members of the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence sharing group — the US, the UK, Canada and New Zealand.

While TikTok came under particular scrutiny, the committee also recommended measures that may impact other big social media players.

For example, it recommended that all large social media platforms “must have an Australian presence” which would likely hit affect Twitter and perhaps BeReal. It also said that social media platforms must “be transparent about any content they censor or account takedowns” — the latter part would likely cause problems for all the large platforms.

For advertisers, a particular point of interest is that social media platforms must “maintain a public library of advertisements on their platform.” This is something that Google (if you can call it social media) and Meta have been working hard on. TikTok has also recently introduced a publicly available library of adverts in the US.

In March, an advertising industry insider told B&T that they didn’t think anyone “truly believes” that there would be a blanket TikTok ban in Australia. With this report, that situation might have changed irrevocably.

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