“So it’s just a coincidence, that 95 per cent of the content about Xinjiang on TikTok is positive, when bodies like Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International, and the United Nations and many governments around the world, said there’s either crimes against humanity, genocide, or other serious human rights abuses happening? Does that sound natural to you?” he said.

“Let me ask you your opinion, do you think there are human rights abuses occurring in Xinjiang?”

“Your reluctance to acknowledge basic facts about the parent company with whom you’re ultimately employed is not a promising start to your willingness to honestly answer these questions … because it is a clearly established fact that there’s a [Communist Party] committee in ByteDance,” he said.

Beijing-based ByteDance has repeatedly insisted that it is not owned by the Chinese state, with some 60 per cent of its shares owned by non-Chinese investors, including Western social media platforms LinkedIn and Twitter.

Paterson applied the same combative tone of questioning with TikTok’s US data security expert Will Farrell, and Australian general manager Lee Hunter, either cutting them off or criticising them for being evasive.

Representatives of Meta – owner of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads – as well as LinkedIn were also quizzed about China in Tuesday’s hearings. In particular, they were asked about “wrongly labelling” content about the so-called lab leak theory as misinformation.

“Now I should stress we don’t know still, today, whether it was natural in origin, or whether it came from the Wuhan Institute of Neurology,” Paterson said. “Either way, that seems like an issue which should be up for debate until we do have conclusive answers on that either way, but it was restricted on your platform. Do you have any reflections or lessons learned from that?”

Meta’s Director of Policy for Australia and New Zealand Mia Garlick said the company worked with the best advice it received during what were “extraordinary circumstances”.

The origins of Covid-19 have been furiously debated in the international community, with some in the US and countries such as Australia insisting that the virus has its origins in a laboratory in Wuhan, where the first human cases were reported in 2019.

China has said there is no credibility to this theory, and US intelligence agencies in June said they found no direct evidence to support it – even though they could not rule out the possibility that the virus came from a laboratory.

WeChat has no permanent representatives in Australia, and hence Canberra lawmakers were unable to mandate executives to be present at the hearing. Tencent said on Monday that despite its absence, it took legal compliance in all its markets seriously and looked forward to engaging with Australian stakeholders.

Paterson had earlier warned in a letter to the company that its absence would lead his committee to “inevitably draw conclusions about its willingness to cooperate with Australian law”.

Outright ban of China-linked apps?

Of the 40 submissions received by the committee, some called for an outright ban on China-linked WeChat and TikTok.

A fresh submission by two Australian experts on WeChat published over the weekend ahead of the hearings, however, said banning these apps would damage Australia’s democracy.

During the last set of hearings in April, the inquiry heard from witnesses who said the Chinese government had used WeChat to harass them and their families.

That set of testimony was fiercely debated, with proponents of the ban describing WeChat as a “narrative machine for the [Communist Party]” while others suggested a ban was hypocritical and giving Western-owned platforms a free pass even though some were part-owned by entities linked to states with questionable rights records.

The fresh submissions by leading Australian WeChat researchers Wanning Sun of the University of Technology Sydney, and RMIT’s Haiqing Yu, argued that a ban on WeChat would inadvertently hurt Australian democracy.

They noted that some 1.2 million Australians of mainland Chinese heritage used WeChat. A ban is “potentially damaging to social cohesion, and is likely to be seen as racially and politically motivated”, they said.

They also made the distinction that WeChat and its Chinese version, Weixin, were separate systems, with WeChat being operated by an entity based in Singapore.

Yu said Paterson’s persistent invitation for WeChat to attend the inquiry would have set up a “trap” for the social media platform. “The purpose is to use WeChat as the pawn in [the] long game of continuing the China threat narrative, to create media panic about Chinese platforms and Chinese influence,” she said.

The hearing will continue on Wednesday, with representatives of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and cybersecurity section of the Australian Federal Police expected to testify.