Sky News Australia, one of the world’s leading media networks, has announced that it would discontinue publishing to the popular Chinese app TikTok in an effort to protect its reporters and audiences from security risks.
Sky called TikTok a “spy network masquerading as a social media platform,” saying the risks of being on TikTok are “far too great for any serious news publisher to ignore” while the gains are “negligible at best.”
The media also criticised other outlets and journalists who reported the platform’s use as a tool for soft power and foreign interference, then later jumped on TikTok themselves. Sky News described TikTok as a “vanity exercise” for media companies who deemed “arbitrary viewership figures” more important than the fact that they “cannot be monetised in any meaningful way.”…