> one massive privacy invading democracy undermining psyop

Sounds like Meta.

To an extent, I agree. I think TikTok is far more insidious. If you look at the agreements US based workers had to sign, to uphold goals of the Chinese government, the injection of state sponsored bias into their product seems pretty explicit. With Meta there have been both private censorship decisions (due to the bias of the company’s own executive and employees) as well as pressure from the US government (see Biden administration back channels to request censorship). But even so, I don’t think these are comparable in magnitude and extent.

At this stage, I don't care whether TikTok, Meta or X is controlled by/controls a nation. They're just harmful.

tit for tat makes the U.S. more like the CCP, and less like the version of the U.S. that stands for freedom and democracy (that I presume you want to live in).

if you want to live in an American version of china where instead of bytedance we have zuckagram, go for it. Chinese social media has vastly out-innovated American platforms and the Zuck/Musk response is to ban the competition rather than write a proper law regulating social media platforms

I understand the argument that TikTok is credibly more exposed to demands from the CCP than American Social media. I'm not entirely convinced it's happening to an alarming degree, some collaboration with governments seem inevitable, but I'm also not unconvinced.

I don't see how that in any way leads into an argument of "If China agrees to open up its market to foreign social media, without censorship, then we can consider TikTok existing." That sounds way more like a national capitalist argument than one for national security.

Congress has "supposedly" seen the evidence, but is confidential. But more than that they seem to be acting in something that can happen more than in something that has happened already

There is absolutely no difference between TikTok, Meta, Google et al.