But shouldn't that concern go the other way? If the Chinese government is dictating content policies of TikTok, that should obviously be a concern, but I have not seen this alleged.

Granted collecting say interest data based on viewing figures would be a precursor (I suppose it's likely that TikTok could figure out if a customer leaned left or right politically). But again that's not what the complaint is about.

It's also hard to ignore that TikTok's responses are at face value reasonable (such as evaluating touch patterns to identify bots... that's obviously something they have to do given the predominance of bots on social media platforms).

I mean, TikTok can manipulate public opinion and access to information more easily than that, by simply artificially demoting/promoting certain content — no user data needed.

Eg. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49826155

Even without the government dictating content policies, the threat is still there. Take how the Chinese government has addressed the exact same concern from their side. That is to say, they've banned US social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter and who's to say if it's solely because of the allegations that those platforms follow US government dictations.

A forseeable future is one where Americans are using VPN to access Tik Tok and then we see some government officials clamoring for an American version of the GFW.

> It's about manipulating public opinion

Do you think Facebook, Twitter and Reddit should be able to do that?

Dunno, but China blocks all of those.

So if they do, it's fine to add another entity to the list?

China does not need to do anything for that, we will to it to ourselves freely with out reservation, they just have to sit back and enjoy the show

Certain adversarial govts have happily participated in the past/ are happily participating