Sky News Australia recently stated that it would stop posting to TikTok, a Chinese app, to reduce the danger of potential security breaches for its reporters and viewers.
Sky News referred to TikTok as a surveillance network posing as a social networking platform. They said that the dangers associated with using TikTok are much too big for any professional news publisher to ignore, while the benefits are, at most, insignificant.
The media also criticized other sites and journalists who stated that the website was being used as a weapon for foreign meddling and power but who then got on TikTok themselves. Sky News referred to TikTok as a vanity project for media firms since these businesses valued arbitrary audience metrics more than the reality that they cannot be monetized in any meaningful sense.
The media firm is owned by News Corp., one of the very few major publications in Australia that have officially banned the Chinese social media platform TikTok.
The action comes after the BBC, which is controlled by the state of the United Kingdom, and DR2, which is a Danish public broadcaster, both issued directives instructing their employees to delete TikTok from corporate phones. The British broadcasting company BBC continues to post articles on the app.
Media organizations previously determined that TikTok was a risky site for their use when ByteDance was found to have unlawfully spied on journalists who were using the platform by acquiring their Internet Protocol addresses and other data. This came to light in the last year.
According to a report, following the decision made by Australia’s AG Mark Dreyfus to prohibit TikTok from being installed on any device given by the Australian government due to concerns about its potential impact on national security, Sky News chose to boycott the app.
In January 2020, the New York Times published an article about a warning issued by the Pentagon. All cell phones belonging to military personnel should be cleared of the TikTok app.
Some officials have gone so far as to aggressively advise members of the armed services against maintaining TikTok on their personal electronic devices.
