TikTok was not among the groups targeted in Inman Grant’s social media enforcement,but Inman Grant said it was newer and regulators had insufficient tools to track its behaviour,flagging a focus on TikTok in her next round of legal notices.
Emphasising TikTok’s harmful algorithm,Inman Grant said in an interview on Monday she had given a presentation on social media to an attorney-general advisory board whose members were “gobsmacked” that big tech was not doing the basics on monitoring content and were “going backwards” from previous standards.
“Any form of terrorist and violent extremist material is either designed to divide and cause fear or spread propaganda,” she said.
“It comes from ideologues from a range of different stripes. It’s meant to have a corrosive impact on people and therefore social cohesion and even democracy.”
TikTok,which has 8.5 million users in Australia and more than a billion globally,has become the subject of heated political debate due to a US push for its Chinese owner,ByteDance,to divest the company to reduce national security risks as companies in China are obliged to co-operate with the Chinese Communist Party.
Opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson,a frequent TikTok critic,and Labor MP Josh Burns said tech companies must help maintain social cohesion by clamping down on violent depictions of events such as the Israel-Hamas war,which Paterson said was all over the popular video-sharing app.