The Australian government is resisting issuing a ban on WeChat on government devices despite many government departments instituting their own bans after the TikTok edict earlier this month.
TikTok was banned from government devices in early April over data collection and security concerns connected to the Chinese government.
The move followed a review by the home affairs department which examined a range of social media platforms, but TikTok was the only app singled out for an immediate ban. At the time TikTok was banned, dozens of federal departments had already banned the app.
Guardian Australia has confirmed that several federal departments have already instituted restrictions on WeChat, a communications app developed by China-based company Tencent. They include the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the agriculture department, the employment department, the education department, the home affairs department, the health department, and the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts.
When asked why the ban had not been extended to WeChat, a spokesperson for the attorney general’s department – which issued the TikTok ban – said the government would continue to assess all “technologies that may pose a security concern and will take further action if required”.
Dr Seth Kaplan, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, told a parliamentary committee hearing last week that “everything that we fear about what TikTok may become is already occurring on WeChat”.
WeChat operates outside China mainly for Chinese diaspora communities. It is the third-most used social media app by Chinese-Australians (47% of those surveyed), just behind YouTube and Facebook, according to a Lowy Institute report released last year.
Many Chinese-Australians get their news from the app, with the report finding 75% of those who use it often or sometimes get news via WeChat – though this was down 11% on the 2021 study. The company reported it had 690,000 daily active users in Australia in 2020.
The home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, said she had deleted her WeChat account along with her TikTok account late last year.
Kaplan told the committee hearing WeChat is “basically a narrative machine for the CCP” and this had flow-on effects for Chinese-language media in Australia.
“Because WeChat is so ubiquitous … it affects everything that’s not on WeChat that involves news and information – and even media that is not directly controlled by the party,” he said.
“It basically means that instead of your democracy being a debate among people who live in the country, there’s an additional voice that plays a large part in the conversation. And that voice is controlled by a foreign government that does not have your best interests at heart.”
However, Xueyin Zha, a researcher in global governance of advanced technology at the Australian National University, said surveillance and censorship on WeChat outside China was less apparent than on its Chinese counterpart, but was still something users had to consider.
Zha said WeChat was an important app for Chinese-Australians to communicate with each other and with family in China, and suggested part of the reason why it hasn’t been banned was because it was a crucial tool for politicians to reach Chinese-Australians.
“It’s this first-stop social media platform for a lot of first-generation immigrants – that’s why it is a little bit harder to just say, ‘this thing is so dangerous and terrible, we should get rid of it’.”
The Australian Tibetan Communities Association highlighted the dilemma faced by people who want to use WeChat to keep in touch with families in its submission to the inquiry.
“Tibetan community members in Australia [are] choosing between surveillance by the Chinese government and not being able to stay in touch with families,” the submission said.
“Tibetan-Australians feel unsafe talking freely to their parents or relatives, much less about Tibetan politics or our exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.”
Zha said the presence of authoritative news sources on WeChat such as SBS and ABC had helped shift where Chinese-Australians find their news, acting as a bridge for migrants to find information outside WeChat.
WeChat, in a submission to the inquiry, said the company was “willing to consider implementing country-specific or other restrictions or qualifications from time to time in respect of promotional political material”, and said the company had in place policies banning misinformation and disinformation.
The company has said, like TikTok, that its Australian user data is held in Singapore, and chat data is only stored on user devices, not retained on servers.
