TikTok ban: Coalition wants Anthony Albanese government to follow ...

US President Joe Biden has signalled he will sign the TikTok bill into law if its passes the Senate, where its future is uncertain, amid intensifying economic and geostrategic competition between the great powers.

Former president Donald Trump, who tried to force ByteDance to sell TikTok when he was in office, has backflipped and is equivocating on the bill, but Republicans overwhelmingly support it.

The prime minister said the government was taking advice from security agencies but rejected calls for a ban on TikTok. “We have no plans to do that. I think you’ve got to be pretty cautious,” he said on radio station WSFM. “You’ve always got to have national security concerns front and centre, but you also need to acknowledge that for a whole lot of people, this provides a way of them communicating.”

The Australian government has banned TikTok on its devices, though other non-Chinese apps are also commonly forbidden by federal departments. Should ByteDance sell TikTok’s US operations, that could still leave TikTok in Australia under the Chinese company’s control, and similarly under a US ban the app would still be available here.

TikTok, which claims 8.5 million Australian users, has launched an aggressive lobbying campaign against the US bill, which passed the House on Thursday AEDT and would mandate a ban if there is no sale in five months.

“This legislation if signed into law will lead to a ban on TikTok in the United States,” said TikTok’s chief executive Shou Zi Chew in a video on the app. “This bill gives more power to a handful of social media companies and take billions of dollars out of the pockets of creators and small businesses. It will put more than 300,000 American jobs at risk.”

He argued that TikTok keeps its users’ data secure and their experience on the app safe. US politicians have been inundated with calls from concerned TikTok users after it put a prominent pop-up ad opposing the ban in its app.

Mr Dutton told a press conference on Thursday that TikTok was not keeping children’s data safe and told Mr Albanese to act. “If he’s got advice from the agencies, which I believe he has, that the information is being hoovered up, and young people don’t have a safe presence online [then] it’s up to the prime minister to respond in the appropriate way.”

China has reacted furiously to the US ban, with a foreign ministry spokesman painting it as unfair and predicting it would “inevitably come back to bite the United States itself”.