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WeChat dominates academic research along with TikTok but other platforms get relatively little scrutiny (CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
An uneven approach to Asian social media apps reflects limitations in how Australia understands its region
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The blind spot in Australia’s approach to Chinese platformsThe blind spot in Australia’s approach to Chinese platforms
When Australia introduced social media age restrictions in December 2025, the eSafety Commissioner published lists of platforms deemed age‑restricted, subject to self‑assessment, or exempt. While many global platforms appeared clearly on one list or another, several major Chinese platforms, including WeChat and Xiaohongshu (rednote), were either absent or ambiguously positioned. This was striking given that WeChat and TikTok have long been scrutinised in Australia and banned on government devices over concerns about national security and foreign interference, while rednote has been accused of spreading election‑related dis/misinformation.
This inconsistency is not primarily about whether age‑based regulation is justified, nor about whether scrutiny of Chinese platforms is warranted. Instead, it points to a deeper structural issue in how Australian mainstream institutions, policymakers, regulators, media organisations, and researchers imagine Chinese, and more broadly non-Western, digital platforms. Services framed as security threats in one context can appear marginal in another, revealing a fragmented and selective understanding of the digital environment.
The inconsistency reflects a broader challenge for US-aligned liberal democracies navigating a fragmenting, multipolar digital order. Two issues stand out. First, a knowledge gap: understanding of Chinese platforms is filtered through narrow, US-centric geopolitical narratives. Second, a wider erosion of Asia knowledge capacity – a failure to systematically grasp how digital infrastructures across the region function and shape everyday life, including within Australia.
Platforms aligned with familiar scripts of risk and rivalry attract attention.
In Australian public discourse, the phrase “Chinese platforms” usually denotes TikTok or WeChat. These platforms dominate discussion in parliamentary inquiries, security commentary, media coverage, and academic research. Their prominence owes less to the diversity of their technological and social functions than to the geopolitical narratives attached to them, shaped by data sovereignty concerns, influence anxieties, and the now-dominant US–China rivalry frame.
Yet TikTok and WeChat represent only a fraction of a much broader Chinese platform ecosystem. China-based companies operate globally across ride-sharing, payments, e-commerce, travel, and lifestyle media, often deeply embedded in everyday life across the Indo-Pacific and in Western countries such as Australia.
A woman uses WeChat Pay app on her phone to scan a code and pay at a market in Beijing (Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images)
Drawing on research conducted for Chinese Platforms: A Critical Introduction, we examined English-language media coverage and peer-reviewed academic publications (published in the five years to March 2025) to assess how attention to Chinese platforms is distributed across public and scholarly debates. The disparity is pronounced. TikTok attracts an extraordinary volume of media attention (more than 292,000 mentions on the media database Factiva), while WeChat dominates academic research (more than 7,500 publications). By contrast, other platforms receive comparatively little sustained scrutiny despite extensive transnational reach and routine use well beyond Chinese-speaking communities. Rednote, for example, recorded 167 hits on Factiva and 89 academic publications, DiDi Chuxing had just five Factiva mentions excluding industry reports, and 299 academic publications, while Trip.com received 225 and 145 respectively. Some widely used services, such as HungryPanda, a food delivery platform founded by Chinese migrants and operating across Western countries without a presence in China, barely register at all in discussions of “Chinese” platforms.
This pattern reflects how visibility is shaped by geopolitical narratives. Platforms aligned with familiar scripts of risk and rivalry attract attention; those functioning as everyday infrastructure, for mobility, payments, or consumption, remain largely invisible, even as they process vast amounts of data. The result is a distorted picture of Chinese platforms as exceptional security objects rather than components of a broader regional digital ecosystem.
Importantly, this attention gap is not confined to Chinese platforms. Other non-Western services, such as LINE or KakaoTalk, which are widely used within Japanese-, Taiwanese-, and Korean-speaking communities, attract even less media or policy interest. Together, these blind spots point to the limits of a US-centric imagination that continues to structure how digital power in Asia is understood.
The implications of this narrow framing become clearer when viewed through migration and diaspora. For many migrants, platforms such as WeChat, rednote, LINE, or KakaoTalk are not marginal alternatives to Western social media. They are an everyday lifeline to access news, health information, community networks, and services across borders. As COVID‑19 demonstrated, these platforms play a central role in how information and trust circulate transnationally, often beyond the reach of national media systems.
Yet regulatory and policy frameworks in Australia continue to assume a monolingual, Western platform user. As a result, non-Western platforms are either securitised in abstract terms or overlooked altogether. This is not just a regulatory gap; it reflects a broader limitation in how Australia understands its region.
More fundamentally, Australia’s uneven recognition of Chinese and other non‑Western platforms signals a decline in its Asia knowledge capacity, which underpins Australia’s ability to maintain social cohesion, navigate geopolitical tensions, and secure the trade and revenue streams that support public services and living standards. Failing to develop a systematic understanding of how Asian digital platforms operate is not simply a regulatory oversight but a weakness that limits Australia’s ability to understand, engage with, and operate effectively in its own region.
Recognising Chinese and other non-Western platforms, then, should be seen as part of building Australia’s understanding of its region – not only in diplomatic or economic terms but through the digital infrastructures that increasingly mediate power, belonging, and trust. A more genuine and systematic engagement with these platforms would strengthen Australia’s knowledge of the Indo‑Pacific and help sustain social cohesion at home in an increasingly interconnected, multipolar digital world.
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