As international concern about Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai’s whereabouts grows and more of the world’s top tennis stars weigh in, Beijing’s propagandists are floundering. Hu Xijin, the impish editor of the rabidly nationalistic Global …
Articles by: "Fergus Ryan"
There’s one thing we’re all getting wrong about TikTok: it’s not really a social media app. As TikTok Australia’s general manager told the Senate Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media in September last …
Scott Morrison demanded three things in his emotionally charged press conference about ‘that tweet’ last week. One: an apology, two: that the Chinese government remove foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian’s post, and three: that Twitter …
Chinese video-sharing app TikTok is facing an existential crisis. By its own estimation, its parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, is set to lose US$6 billion after being kicked out of India. A decision on a ban …
The news that Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok is not approved for use on devices owned by Australia’s Department of Defence, as the ABC reported today, is hardly a surprise. Defence’s default position on what apps …
In the 18 months the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission was busily working away on its 623-page opus on digital platforms, Chinese-owned app upstart TikTok grew a global audience of over 700 million. With no …
Considering Australia had only 45 seconds to deliver its recommendations on China’s human rights situation at the UN review of the country’s record in Geneva yesterday, our diplomats managed to pack quite a lot in. …
Open-source intelligence (OSINT) has long been undervalued; elbowed out by sexier-sounding ‘secret intelligence’, it has also often been overlooked. But what is intelligence? For the answer, let’s go straight to the wisdom of the Middle …
Anyone watching Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony to Congress in April following the Cambridge Analytica scandal would be forgiven for thinking US politicians shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near tech policy. The questions the mostly grey-haired representatives fielded …
The world This week, the summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong‑un overwhelmingly captured the world’s attention. The two leaders signed a joint statement, President Trump followed with a lengthy press conference and The …
In the three months’ worth of data I collected from the top 10 foreign embassies in China—measured by follower numbers for my just-released report Weibo diplomacy and censorship in China—the Australian embassy’s account was censored just …
Julie Bishop was playing a dangerous game when she privately blamed the Australian media’s ‘negative reports’ for adversely affecting Australia–China relations during her meeting with her Chinese counterpart on the sidelines of the G20 in Argentina …