a) funding a massive 50 cent army b) censoring any information the state does not want you to see c) jailing anyone who say the wrong thing with their data d) controlling pretty much your entire life through the social credit system
You guys are drawing lots of false equivalences. Streamers in China have been 'disappeared' for weeks for offenses as harmless as singing the national anthem badly, or saying nice things about Taiwan.
When tech companies start doing this, maybe we'll have an equivalence:
That is a false choice. The government will always have the power. In a democracy it must be held accountable for that power by its citizens.
Isn't that covered by the OP? Regardless of the private sector's surveillance capability, they don't have access to violence. This by itself makes it less worse than the CCP.
Government is supposed to keep the private sector honest, so to speak. With weak government, and a private sector with single entities that have more data about citizens than government, the risk is arguably greater.
There are reasonable limits placed on government in the US, but those limits do not apply to the private sector.
Comparisons of China to the US make some sense when based on size, but if ignoring size, comparing the US to China on the issue of digital privacy and propaganda seems strange assuming one is trying to illustrate that the US is some sort of high benchmark. It is arguable there are other countries where citizens are enjoying greater digital privacy and more freedom from propaganda than in the US. It would seem to make more sense to compare the US to those countries.