April 26, 2024
TikTok's Australian boss has rubbished calls for the app to be banned after the United States Congress passed a bill on Wednesday forcing the social network to be sold or ousted from that country within a year.
Brett Armstrong, general manager of TikTok's advertising division in Australia, defended the platform by pointing to its contribution to local businesses and jobs in an interview with The Australian Financial Review.
"There's no reason for TikTok to be banned," Mr Armstrong said.
"There's no evidence of any concerns and that's why we're focused on [TikTok's contributions] here."
The US bill, which the Senate passed on Wednesday AEST and will now be signed by President Joe Biden, requires TikTok to be sold by its Chinese parent company ByteDance within nine months. Mr Biden can extend that deadline by three months if progress towards a sale is being made.
Banning TikTok is likely to inflame trade tensions between the two powers, with China previously criticising moves towards a forced sale, putting Australia in the middle.
Congress passed the law because a majority of its members fear TikTok could be used to influence the opinions of and collect data on Americans by ByteDance at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party. But it only covers TikTok in the US, not Australia, and TikTok has rejected those claims.
Coalition home affairs spokesman James Paterson said that if the Albanese government did not quickly pass laws mirroring the US, TikTok could be split into two versions.
"[There could be] a safer one for Americans, free of Chinese Communist Party influence, and a dangerous one for the rest of the world including Australia beholden to an authoritarian state," Senator Paterson said.
He demanded the government act, saying the Coalition would work with it in a bipartisan way.
TikTok says it will challenge the legislation on free speech grounds under the US Constitution, before the US ban comes into effect.
A spokesman for Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil said the government had banned TikTok on government phones handling sensitive information on the advice of intelligence agencies, but did not endorse the US ban.
"We are monitoring events in the US closely, and will take additional advice if any potential sale or new information from our agencies make it necessary," the spokesman said.
Microsoft and a group of investors, including former US Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, have previously expressed interest in buying TikTok, though whether that would extend to Australia without federal intervention is unclear.
Mr Armstrong said TikTok's 8.5 million Australian individual and 350,000 business users "can be reassured that TikTok isn't going to go anywhere".
A report paid for by TikTok and created by the consultancy Oxford Economics, released a fortnight ago, found that TikTok had supported 13,000 jobs and contributed $1.1 billion in GDP to Australia. It did not take into account whether those jobs and sales would have happened anyway via other platforms if TikTok was not here.
"It was good to get that verification not from us, but from a third party that's respected," Mr Armstrong said.
"We've seen in the years of working in this market, these owners and businesses that have just found so much success through this platform."
Mr Armstrong repeatedly declined to discuss how a TikTok ban would work in Australia or what strategies the company would use to oppose it, branding the subject "hypothetical".
He did not directly answer questions about whether TikTok was highlighting its economic impact as a latent threat to the government should it choose to act against the platform.
In the US, TikTok put banners in its app warning users of the threat to its platform in recent months, resulting in a deluge of calls to legislators. The bill that passed wrapped up the TikTok ban, which had been stalled in the Senate, with other pending legislation that will funnel tens of billions of dollars to Israel, Taiwan and Ukraine.
Seek co-founder and Square Peg Capital partner Paul Bassat hailed the legislation. "Politicians on all sides have showed a willingness to put country over party and the toxic threat of TikTok will abate," Mr Bassat said on X.
The founder of Australian sales startup Qwilr, Mark Tanner, said he thought that Australia was perhaps 40 per cent likely to follow the US.
"Surely we'd rather be with whoever the new US owner is," Mr Tanner said.
