A federal parliamentary investigation, Foreign Interference through Social Media, has taken aim at TikTok for not being clear in response to questions on its ownership and conduct.
The Senate inquiry report recommends Australia fine and, as a last resort, ban platforms if they fail to meet a minimum set of transparency requirements.
It sees countering foreign interference through social media as one of Australia's most pressing security challenges.
And it wants platforms run or controlled by authoritarian regimes to be labelled as such.
“The committee found that TikTok engaged in a determined effort to obfuscate and avoid answering the most basic questions about the platform, its parent company ByteDance and its relationship to the Chinese Communist Party,” the report says.
“That's one reason why the committee has also recommended that social media companies that repeatedly fail to meet the minimum transparency requirements should be subject to fines and, as a last resort, may be banned by the Minister for Home Affairs with appropriate oversight mechanisms in place.”
TikTok did make an 11-page submission to the inquiry and, in response to the report, released a statement from Ella Woods-Joyce, director of public policy AUNZ.
'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," says Woods-Joyce.
"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."
The inquiry also found WeChat had failed the transparency test by refusing to participate in public hearings on the basis that, despite its significant digital presence, it does not have a physical presence in Australia.
The report says developing a real-time understanding of and response to foreign interference through social media is critical to protecting Australian values, freedoms and way of life.
“The committee believes that strengthening transparency requirements on social media companies is critical to ensuring they operate with integrity while also preserving the right of Australians to freely communicate and participate in public debate online,” the report says.
“The committee is gravely concerned that the information Australians receive on these platforms is being influenced by directions from foreign authoritarian governments.
“That's why we have recommended a range of enforceable transparency standards, so that users can both evaluate the content they see on these platforms, and the conduct of the platforms themselves.
“For example, we believe state-affiliated media entities should be proactively labelled on all platforms.
“We recommend that any content censored at the direction of a government be disclosed to users.
“Platforms should be open to independent external researchers who can identify, investigate and attribute coordinated inauthentic behaviour. The access to user data facilitated by these platforms, especially to employees based in authoritarian countries, must be disclosed.
“It's not too late to arrest the threat. With a concerted joint effort by government, the private sector and civil society, we can ensure Australia's way of life prevails.”
The inquiry noted that Meta’s Threads, the so-called Twitter killed, collects more user data than Twitter including data on health, purchases, financial info, location, contact info, search history and browsing history.
The inquiry is also concerned with a "serious" risk of Western social media companies being weaponised by authoritarian regimes to pump disinformation into Australia’s democracy to influence and undermine political systems.
Between 2017 and 2022, Facebook's parent company, Meta, disabled more than 200 covert influence operations originating from more than 60 countries that targeted the public domestic debate of another country.
In the first quarter of 2023, YouTube terminated more than 900 channels linked to Russia and more than 18,000 linked to China.
The inquiry says social media platforms are also being used to: gather intelligence on individuals that will enable them to be targeted; to gather behavioural data by population or cohort to refine interference campaigns; to harass and intimidate Australia's diaspora communities; and to undermine societal trust, spread social disunity and influence decision-making through disinformation campaigns.
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