James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I, of course, rise to speak in favour of this motion. I thank the member for Fisher for bringing this important debate to the chamber. I strongly encourage the government to take this issue seriously and to look at, to begin with, what our very important allies, particularly our Five Eyes partners, are doing when it comes to their approach to this application. The jury is well and truly in on these national security risks that TikTok poses. We've seen our other Five Eyes allies already take decisive action when it comes to the use of this application on government devices. Of course, in this motion, we're calling for the Australian government merely to do what our partners, with whom we have a close intelligence-sharing operation and cooperation, are doing themselves. Obviously they have taken those actions because they see a significant risk from this technology, given the data storage revelations that have come to light recently. In testimony in the United States just in the last week or two, we've seen the company confirm that they house and store data on their users. We've got extreme concerns about what could happen to that data and the variety of ways that that data could be used. It could feed certain content to users that might drive their awareness and, perhaps, their opinions on important issues. It could interfere in our democracy as we hold elections, in particular. There is the risk that content will be mangled through the use of algorithms to drive certain views and certain attitudes in, and amongst, those users that could influence our elections.

The mover of the motion talked about the risk to young people in particular. The other strong concern we've got—on top of the very important national security issues that this raises—is the type of content that is being fed to young, impressionable people. It is also of great concern when, as the mover mentioned, we hear of content that might facilitate a decision to commit suicide or promote the development of a challenging or significant psychological issue, such as an eating disorder or the like. The fact that young children who are so impressionable are at risk from this application driving that sort of behaviour is extremely serious.

I think the way in which the company operates and the way in which the algorithm operates are extremely opaque at best, and, at worst, could, as I've outlined, be used in ways that are designed to drive the behaviour of people in our society at democratic milestones—that is, at elections and the like—and drive them to hold certain attitudes that are incorrect because they are receiving content that they do not realise is designed to drive their views on a particular issue rather than being dispassionate and a fair representation of those sorts of topics.

Now, as technology continues to develop rapidly, we've got to be very aware of the risky side of technology and particularly of the ways in which it can potentially cause harm, from a national security point of view and just more generally in our society. The fact that this application can currently be used on government devices is a serious issue, in our view, and one that the government should reflect on; it should consider going down the path of many of our allies and not allowing this technology to be on those devices.

This technology may possibly have the capacity—if not now then in the future—to scrape data from those devices and access points into networks and the like. We've certainly heard that when and where decisions have been made to ban this software going on such devices, that it has been as to a very credible risk—where one little update to the software of an application might suddenly give it a capability that we just haven't anticipated and haven't got the ability to protect against, particularly when it comes to penetrating our government networks and accessing information. You've got to protect people's data and people have to know that, when they're using their phone, they are not having information about themselves being used and stored, to be, potentially, used against them at some time, or to influence them, or, indeed, to be used to penetrate our important government networks. And, for those reasons, this motion should definitely be supported.

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