Australian Lawmakers Advocate Potential WeChat Ban on Govt Gadgets

SYDNEY (Reuters) – A senate committee investigating how overseas powers use social media to intrude in Australia has really helpful a swathe of guidelines and restrictions for social media platforms, together with probably banning Chinese language messaging service WeChat on authorities gadgets.

Tuesday’s report accommodates 17 suggestions together with new transparency guidelines enforceable by fines, increasing an present TikTok ban on authorities gadgets to contractors and investigating a ban on WeChat on authorities gadgets.

Corporations like TikTok and WeChat posed “distinctive nationwide safety dangers” as a result of their mother or father corporations, ByteDance and Tencent, are headquartered in China and topic to its nationwide safety legal guidelines, committee chair Senator Paterson in a press release.

“Platforms like TikTok and WeChat which might be topic to the management of authoritarian regimes illustrate the broader cyber safety danger to delicate authorities data,” he stated in a press release.

The committee additionally really helpful that Australia helps creating nations within the Indo-Pacific resist “malicious data operations” by authoritarian states.

Led by Liberal Social gathering Senator James Paterson, the five-person committee on overseas interference by way of social media consists of two members from the ruling Labor social gathering, though the report’s suggestions usually are not binding.

The workplace of the Prime Minister and Minister for Residence Affairs didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.

Whereas many suggestions singled out Chinese language social media platforms, a set of 11 transparency guidelines would require all massive social media platforms to label state affiliated media accounts, and disclose when governments direct content material moderation and actions towards accounts of elected officers.

(Reporting by Lewis Jackson, enhancing by Ed Osmond)

Copyright 2023 Thomson Reuters.