"I found it funny that the author of this post is trying to defend liberal values like the free flow of information on the internet by...making Apple and Google remove Tiktok from people's phones."

This is what the posted article is about. I cannot write a rebuttal to this that is better than what Ben Thompson wrote, and I won't. The section "A Reluctant Prescription" section is directly about this.

I can rebut this, however:

"However, American tech companies manipulate their recommendation algorithms for political reasons (in the loose sense of the word political) all the time and I'm sure not everyone in the world likes that either."

They don't do it in China.