I think you are generalizing my claim. My claim is specifically that the claim that the Chinese is using TikTok as some American programming vector is sinophobic. The CCP could be tracking the location of government officials through tiktok; that is a legitimate concern. If you want TikTok banned in the US because you believe that they promote dumb content as part of some strategic Chinese plot and you conveniently ignore Meta and Google, I'm going to assume that your reasoning comes from irrational fear of the Chinese. It doesn't make sense to distrust the Chinese when they are doing the same thing as Americans (unless you don't like them just because they are Chinese).

If you want to ban TikTok for another reason (such as their incredibly poor data hygiene, such as tracking every action you do within their app browser), then that is fair and you can reasonably argue that point from the grounds of privacy and national defense.

My reasoning in calling it sinophobia is because if you actually care about "dumb content" the proper solution is REGULATION for ALL the social media companies. Singling out TikTok makes no sense at all.

>It doesn't make sense to distrust the Chinese when they are doing the same thing as Americans (unless you don't like them just because they are Chinese)

If the Chinese and the Americans behaved identically in all other respects, this would be excellent logic. As they do not, it is spurious logic. I don't think you really believe that the Chinese style of governance and Chinese culture are the same as the American style of governance and American culture.

Put another way, there's an Australian law that can literally compel Australian coders to become secret agents and implant government backdoors into products they work on at their government's whim [0, 1]. It is not, and would not be, "aussiephobia" to not want to hire a person for whom this is a possibility, or to avoid products that Australian forced-backdoors are likely to be present in. Individual Australians are unlikely to support this, and shouldn't be individually blamed, but does that change the reality of the law?

>My reasoning in calling it sinophobia is because if you actually care about "dumb content" the proper solution is REGULATION for ALL the social media companies. Singling out TikTok makes no sense at all

I've heard it said that politics is the "art of the possible". From a fairness perspective, I'd love to see Western social media get a little regulated. From a harm-reduction perspective, sanctioning the Other social media is, at best, the first step to regulating everything else, and at worst, the only thing we're ever going to get.

[0] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/12/new_australia...

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2018A00148

> The CCP could be tracking the location of government officials through tiktok; that is a legitimate concern

Are you claiming that TikTok is able to track users and bypass mobile phones opt in requirements for location data ? Yes I know they can do course tracking based on IP address.