Think about how last summer Harvard discovered that Covid started in Wuhan back in August 2019 using satellite imagery and then overnight the focus became how to combat anti-Chinese sentiment (hate crimes had risen against Asian-Americans to levels seen earlier in the 2010s, still an order of magnitude less prevalent than hate crimes against American Blacks). TikTok was the principle platform leading that charge. Pretty simple strategy and it worked, no one even talks about the timing of the Wuhan cover up anymore.

From where I'm sitting, the overnight focus was on establishing public health protocols to prevent the healthcare system from a black-swan type of event-driven collapse.

And passing legislation to provide financial relief.

And coordinating global travel restrictions.

And coordinating vaccine development efforts.

Those four things are absolutely what the discourse morphed into, but it goes to show the success of the campaign. Because Trump called it the "kung flu" and is almost always racist with his rhetoric, liberals piled onto anyone that tried to dig into the origin of covid as being racially motivated. TikTok made that culture war really simple for liberals to fight. Trump is a nasty guy full of bad ideas, but the culture war and Trump Derangement Syndrome are real things that shut down legitimate inquiry.

> Where's the evidence that TT has been successfully used for nefarious purposes on a similar scale?

I don't need to see a particular bomb blow up to know it'll be dangerous when detonated.

The concern is exactly that such evidence might be much harder to find for TikTok. Cambridge Analytica's clients included multiple prominent American politicians, including the sitting president at the time the scandal broke. China would try their hardest to stop a scandal involving Xi Jinping from breaking in the first place, and certainly the People's Congress wouldn't demand a public investigation as the US Congress did.

Cambridge Analytica is not a government, they don't operate prison camps for millions of people (many of whom were targeted by online surveillance).

Correct. They just offer their services exclusively to people that want to win elections.