I actually think it's a good point. There's no way in the US we'd tolerate the government regulating the content on the platform.

The US government have regulating contents on broadcasters since forever.

Lots of countries have regulations on broadcasting. Percent of locally produced content, what age people can see what etc.

It is a difference, if TikTok would activly try to make the west dumber and china smarter vs. just different rules of those states.

The first could be viewed as a attack vs. the latter is a mere choice of the states involved.

Right, and I think it depends on what the intent is. If TikTok's default would be to just promote "dumb" content everywhere (because that's what increases engagement and sells ads or whatever), but the Chinese government is like "no, you're making our citizens dumber; you have to promote 'smart' content in the China market", then that's totally fine. I mean, I don't agree with the level of interference the Chinese government has empowered itself with, but that's their business.

If the Chinese government were forcing TikTok to promote "dumb" content to citizens of adversary countries, then that would be a bit more nefarious.

>If TikTok's default would be to just promote "dumb" content everywhere (because that's what increases engagement and sells ads or whatever), but the Chinese government is like "no, you're making our citizens dumber; you have to promote 'smart' content in the China market", then that's totally fine.

But that is what happened. The CCP went on a huge clampdown on the newer internet companies around that time that Jack Ma was abducted and passed numerous laws censoring and limiting what people could do online, such as how long teenagers could play video games.