Former Turnbull security adviser auditing academicsâ links to China
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Some of Australiaâs top universities have called in a Chinese Communist Party expert to detect foreign interference risks, including auditing academics from at least one institution to see if they have secret secondary jobs.
The universities of Sydney, New South Wales, Monash and Queensland have all engaged former journalist and government adviser John Garnaut through consultancy firm McGrathNicol in a move designed to reassure the federal government they are taking the issue seriously.
“These social media platforms ultimately are commercial enterprises. In part, they make their money from selling access to data, so not all of this content is simply freely available,” says Professor Axel Bruns, a researcher at the Queensland University of Technology’s Digital Media Research Centre. “So much of our lives now happens in social media spaces, in the same way perhaps that in the 1800s or so, letters between people would have been a really important source,” Bruns says. “Interactions and public responses by social media users to what’s happening in the world are a really important source of information not just right now . but also in the future.”