Australian Lawmakers Suggest Potential WeChat Ban on Authorities Gadgets

A senate committee investigating how overseas powers use social media to intrude in Australia has advisable a swathe of guidelines and restrictions for social media platforms, together with doubtlessly banning Chinese language messaging service WeChat on authorities gadgets.

Tuesday’s report incorporates 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.

Firms like TikTok and WeChat posed “distinctive nationwide safety dangers” as a result of their guardian corporations, ByteDance and Tencent, are headquartered in China and topic to its nationwide safety legal guidelines, committee chair Senator Paterson in an announcement.

“Platforms like TikTok and WeChat which can be topic to the management of authoritarian regimes illustrate the broader cyber safety threat to delicate authorities info,” he mentioned in an announcement.

The committee additionally advisable that Australia helps creating international locations within the Indo-Pacific resist “malicious info operations” by authoritarian states.

Led by Liberal Celebration Senator James Paterson, the five-person committee on overseas interference by way of social media contains two members from the ruling Labor occasion, 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 giant social media platforms to label state affiliated media accounts, and disclose when governments direct content material moderation and actions in opposition to accounts of elected officers.

© Thomson Reuters 2023

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