The Federal government’s ban on TikTok on government-issued devices was, reportedly, a long time coming.
The Prime Minister apparently had a review from the Department of Home Affairs on his desk for several weeks but decided to sit on it for a while before signing off on a ban. One government source told The Australian that the Prime Minister was waiting until the result of the Aston by-election to announce the ban to avoid alienating the area’s large Chinese-Australian community.
TikTok’s general manager for Australia and New Zealand, Lee Hunter, said that the government was playing politics, instead of looking at the facts of the situation. According to Monica Whitty, a professor in the Department of Software Systems & Cybersecurity at Monash University, the government would not have taken the decision lightly.
“You can try and read between the lines about what they [TikTok] mean about not looking at facts. But the facts that [the government] is looking at is about security,” she explained.
However, in Whitty’s mind, TikTok is symptomatic of a wider problem with social media platforms that collect vast troves of user data before combining it in different ways without informing users.
“Whenever we’re looking at data and how our data is being used by organisations like TikTok and other platforms, we should always be concerned. There is not a lot of regulation around all of this.
“The general user doesn’t realise how you can connect that data and how you can use that data. Various data points can be connected and you can find more bits of your information by doing that recombination of data.”
Whether government employees constitute general users, of course, is up for debate. Certainly, one would expect high-ranking civil servants to be more judicious with the use of their work devices. However, this might be academic, as well.
“Let’s say [the ban] is the right solution and that it’s going to help in terms of security. It may help to some extent but employees working for government agencies still use their private and personal devices in their workplaces as well. So it won’t solve the problem completely,” Whitty explained.
“Cybersecurity can be very complex, when it’s not explained in a clear way, what tends to happen is that humans switch off and put it in the too-hard basket. ‘I think this is fun, I want to use it, I’m not going to think about the implications because it’s too scary.’ You can think about that with all sorts of behaviours, that unless you have the information, it’s hard to know. Look at how we dealt with COVID, for instance.”
For brands and advertisers, whether they should follow suit with the government and stop using the platform, seems fairly clear-cut to Whitty.
“It’s up to them. But, when you see the government starting to say we don’t want this on these devices, you’re getting a smaller audience already.”
With some two million public sector workers in Australia, that market could shrink quite quickly for TikTok.
“Obviously TikTok tends to have a younger audience but there are other concerns with TikTok and other platforms. The sorts of behaviour you see on these sites aren’t necessarily healthy things for children to see and this is unregulated, as well,” said Whitty.
“I would love to see platforms that actually think about humans’ needs but also think about how to regulate all the bad stuff that happens on those platforms, the aggressive behaviour, the stuff that’s not good for kids to see.
“It’s a wider problem that we still haven’t come to an agreement on what a good social media platform looks like.”
TikTok’s Hunter, meanwhile, has maintained throughout the course of this whole affair that TikTok is no more of a threat than any other social media platform.
“Again, we stress that there is no evidence to suggest that TikTok is in any way a security risk to Australians and we should not be treated differently to other social media platforms,” he said.
“Our millions of Australian users deserve a government which makes decisions based upon facts and which treats all businesses fairly, regardless of country of origin.”
