Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has ruled out a total ban on Chinese social media app TikTok, after a bipartisan push in the United States to force the app’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell the platform to a company that is not based in China.
The US government fears TikTok’s links to the Chinese government pose a digital security risk for Americans. If ByteDance refuses to comply, TikTok faces being completely ban in the US as a result.
Closer to home, shadow home affairs spokesman James Paterson told Sky News TikTok gives the Chinese government “unregulated access” to Australian devices and uses that to abuse citizens’ data and influence their world views.
He called for the Australian government to ban the platform. Currently, the app is only banned on government devices.
“(It) breaks the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and what has become the most dominant source of news and information in the world for young people,” he said.
But Mr Albanese said there were “no plans” to ban TikTok outright.
“You’ve always got to have national security concerns, front and centre,” he told The New Daily.
“You also need to acknowledge that for a whole lot of people, this provides a way of them communicating.
“In Australia, TikTok is only banned on government devices, which prevents public servants from downloading the app on their work-issued phones.”
Do you think TikTok should be banned completely? Or is that going too far?
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