In theory, you can vote to influence your own government, but not the foreign interest.

Ok, but none of the domestic interests are (theoretically) controlled by the government and yet all are (evidently) at least as malicious.

I suppose this would be easier to rationalize if domestic interests were democratically controllable.... but they're not. And they certainly aren't by canadians, which makes this action doubly confusing.

People throughout this thread seem to disagree with your first point.

Hence the "(theoretically)" hedge. The theory for how control is maintained has been well-established for at least three decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

Nonetheless, this underlines the hypocrisy of punishing TikTok but not western corporations. By any standard (except for foreign control, which is of dubious merit when domestic control is equally harmful) Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc are equally of deserving of restriction as TikTok is.