That's exactly what it's like. The strategy is to keep users engaged and entertained, while keeping them dumb. Talk about Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, the Indian border conflict or a ton of other topics and you might find your content shadow-banned or your account gets suspended. Since they try this as much as they can get away with, you can be sure the recommendations and trends are manufactured based on what ByteDance/the CCP wants you to see.

It's telling the type of content is almost exactly the same as on Douyin, the Mainland Chinese version.