Australian PM loses control over WeChat account

Australian lawmakers accused China of political interference on Monday, after Prime Minister Scott Morrison's WeChat account was taken over and renamed.

The name of the account is now "New Life for Chinese Australians" and the description "providing information for the Chinese community on living in Australia."

WeChat is an instant messaging and social media app developed by Chinese firm Tencent. It has more than 1.2 billion active users, mostly residing in mainland China.

'Foreign interference of Australian democracy'

Security official James Paterson, who is also a senator representing Morrison's conservative Liberal Party, accused China of censoring the prime minister. He said that WeChat has not replied to an Australian government request that the account be restored.

"What the Chinese government has done by shutting down an Australian account is foreign interference of Australian democracy in an election year," Paterson told Sydney Radio. Australia is set to hold a federal election in May.

Paterson also called for a boycott of the platform, saying that "no politician should be on WeChat and legitimizing their censorship."

"There's 1.2 million Australians of Chinese descent who overwhelmingly use this service and now can no longer access news and information from their prime minister," he said.

"Yet they can still gain access to critiques of the government, attacks on the government by the opposition leader," Paterson said, alluding to the fact that Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese's WeChat account remains unchanged.

When did Morrison open the account?

According to Australian public broadcaster ABC, for Morrison to open an official account, WeChat needed the account owner to supply the ID of a Chinese national or tie their account to a business registered in China.

According to the ABC, Morrison opened the account in 2019. The ABC added that the prime minister's office used a Chinese agency to register the account, and that ID details logged by WeChat showed the account was tied to a male Chinese citizen from the country's southern Fujian province.

Australian newspaper the Daily Telegraph reported that the agency in charge of the account has been locked out of it since July 2021 and has made several requests to regain access.

Fergus Ryan, senior analyst with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, was cited by Reuters as saying that having the prime minister's account under the name of a Chinese citizen was "always risky and ill-advised," and appeared to be a breach of WeChat rules.

"Any account set up in this way can be shut down at a moment's notice," he said.

sdi/rs (AP, Reuters, Lusa)