Give it a try. It's weird, fun, educational, stupid. It's whatever you make of it. Is it also whatever China wants you to make of it? Maybe. But they could do the same thing with news, TV, or movies.

The most essential advice I can give to any new user of TikTok is to be EXTREMELY liberal with the "long press > not interested" feature. The default FYP ("For you page", the algorithmic feed) is initially tuned towards the average teen, with lots of garbage (pranks, half-dressed women, and assorted other trashy content). The algo is pretty good at picking up what keeps your attention, so be careful what you give your attention to.

If you tune it right, there's a lot of good content on there, though.

The crux of TikTok's success is that you don't have to "game the algorithm" like in other apps, and it's quite resilient even if you try. It seems to know what's an organic signal and what's an artificial signal.

Most other short-form content recommendation algorithms overfit like crazy (ahem Instagram ahem), and many users trying to bend it a certain way mess it up.

The law doesn't authorize blocking access to servers outside the US.

(to the respondents to my op): thanks!