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MELBOURNE, Australia — It was before a federal election when Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison opened his public WeChat account in 2019. He said it would allow him to communicate directly with Chinese-Australians and better understand the issues that concern them.

It turned out on Monday that Mr. Morrison’s account on the hugely popular Chinese messaging app has not only been frozen since last year, but his photo has also been removed and the account is now controlled by a Chinese company. my new job.

Mr. Morrison still has posts and 76,000 followers. But the episode was originally reported by daily telegram In Australia, there was an angry response from members of Mr. Morrison’s conservative party, with some calling the loss of his WeChat account a hijacking.

Other conservative politicians have accused the Chinese social media platform of trying to interfere with Australia’s upcoming federal election, possibly by suppressing free speech like Mr Morrison’s. The episode also sparked debate over whether lawmakers should use WeChat to communicate with the country’s 1.2 million residents of Chinese descent. A spokesperson for Mr. Morrison declined to comment.

All this added to another tense chapter in the fraying diplomatic relations between Australia and China.

James Paterson, a senator from the Prime Minister’s conservative Liberal Party and chairman of the powerful Joint Intelligence and Security Committee, said in a statement: Declaration He said the hacking of Mr. Morrison’s account was an effort by the Chinese Communist Party to “interfere with our democracy and silence our freedom of expression”.

He noted that opposition leader Anthony Albanese still has a WeChat account.

“We cannot allow a foreign authoritarian government to interfere with our democracy and set the terms for public debate in Australia,” Mr Paterson said.

For his part, Mr Albanese aforementioned News of its competitor’s WeChat problems were “a real concern,” but he declined to promise to boycott the platform.

There is no direct evidence that the Communist Party was involved in the disappearance of Mr. Morrison’s account. Typically, when high-ranking Chinese officials are at odds with Beijing, their social media accounts disappear and the censorship deletes all references to them or their posts.

WeChat is owned by Chinese tech giant Tencent. With 1.26 billion users worldwide, the app is popular with those living in China and members of the Chinese diaspora who use it to chat with family and friends, read the news, pay and more. It has been used to spread misinformation and Chinese government propaganda and is known to censor content. President Donald J. Trump, along with Chinese-owned TikTok, tried to ban WeChat from operating in the US, He said it was a national security threat. A federal judge later issued an injunction.

In a statement confirming the changes to Mr. Morrison’s account, Tencent said: “There is no evidence of any hacking or third-party interference. This appears to be a dispute over account ownership. ”

However, not much was known about how the transfer took place. For a public WeChat account to change hands, the original owner must fill out a paper form, notarize it, and upload it to WeChat. According to Tencent’s website.

The China Cyberspace Administration, which is responsible for the country’s internet affairs, could not be immediately reached for comment.

Zhao Lijian, Spokesperson of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, aforementioned At a regular press conference on Monday evening, he was not aware of the details of Mr. Morrison’s statement, but added: “The accusation of Chinese interference is nothing more than baseless defamation and defamation. We are not and are not interested in meddling with other countries.”

Mr. Paterson aforementioned Mr. Morrison’s team started having problems logging into the account in mid-2021. According to Mr. Paterson, the government wrote to WeChat asking the social media platform to restore the account, but to no avail. Mr Morrison’s last post was in July 2021, when he outlined economic support for residents who lost their jobs due to the pandemic quarantines.

Due to WeChat’s rules that public accounts must be registered by a Chinese citizen, Mr. Morrison had registered his account through a Chinese agent.

According to public information, the name of the account changed from ScottMorrison2019 to Aus-Chinese New Living in October 2021. According to viewable information, Tencent confirmed in November that Fuzhou 985 Information Technology, a computer software and information technology company based in Fujian Province, has become the new commercial owner of the account. The account now says it provides information to overseas Chinese about living in Australia.

Tencent confirmed the transfer. “The account in question was first registered by a PRC person and then transferred to a technology services company with its current operator,” the statement said, using the initials of the People’s Republic of China.

Huang Aipeng, the legal representative of Fuzhou 985, said in a phone call that the company now owns the WeChat account. But he insisted that he did not know that the previous owner was the leader of Australia.

“We didn’t know what this public account was used for,” Mr. Huang said.

He explained that he legitimately purchased the account because the company needed a public WeChat account that already had followers (a common practice in China). He refused to say who he got the account from.

This isn’t the first time Mr. Morrison has faced the Chinese social media giant. A WeChat post by the prime minister in 2020 criticized a manipulated image posted on Twitter by a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry, which showed an Australian soldier holding a knife to the throat of an Afghan boy. WeChat censored the prime minister’s post, saying it violated its guidelines.

More broadly, Canberra has long accused Beijing of meddling in Australia’s internal affairs. The relationship reached a new low in 2020 as Australia called for an investigation into the origin of the coronavirus and China imposed tariffs on Australian products, including wine and barley. Australia also spoke about the oppression of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang and participated in the diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics in Beijing to protest China’s human rights record.

With the loss of Mr. Morrison’s account, some Australian officials have pledged to leave WeChat. Among them was Hong Kong-born parliamentarian Gladys Liu, whose constituency includes voters of Chinese heritage.

“This kind of interference with our political processes, especially in an election year, is unacceptable and this issue should be taken very seriously by all Australian politicians,” he said. Declaration. “Due to these concerns, I will no longer be using my official or personal WeChat accounts to communicate until the platform self-discloses.”

Immigration minister Alex Hawke hasn’t used his WeChat account since 2019. However, he also said he “has no intention of using it in the near future”.

Yan Zhuang Reported from Melbourne, Australia and John Liu From Taipei, Taiwan.