you articulated it perfectly
the issue is not that tiktok harvests user data, not free speech, not that China is refuses to let US counterparts operate in China - the issue is, TikTok is an insidious propaganda machine that influences our your people, and entire generation, to abandon their values and replace them with views favorable to the CCP
daily, hourly, and each minute young people interact with TikTok, they're influenced by a foreign adversary.
it's telling them Ukraine is the actual aggressor, that Putin is "based", that China is a paradise, that the West is falling, that China has a valid claim on all the maritime disputes, among other things that are non-truths
i owe the rise of antisemitism among young people to TikTok. young people who otherwise do not hold a negative opinion towards Israel suddenly became anti-Israel and hold hatred towards Jews
i have experienced the above first-hand. my account doesn't interact with any current affairs, yet I am bombarded with anti-Israel narratives. there are thousands - yes, thousands - of antisemitic comments and replies under each video. and young people read them and think it's normal - that it's normal to think this way and say such things at loud
i reported hundreds of such comments. all my reports, according to TikTok, did not violate their "community standards". instead, my replies to those comments were removed for violating their "community standards"
(to the people who'll say it's not true, i have data to back it up, and i can send a link to a huggingface repo that contains the dataset)
it is clear pro-CCP and CCP-aligned views are promoted while others are supressed.
i live in a country with tensions with China, and my TikTok FYP page is flooded with pro-CCP narratives and narratives that suggest my country is weak and hopeless
TikTok is a national security issue. it's not enough the TikTok divests from China. it must be banned for the sake of the next century.
I agree all of these other arguments that people are fixating on are complete red herrings. The 'fairness' of letting them operate their companies here and not letting us operate there—totally non consequential argument and a red herring. The free speech thing is a blatant red herring and the Supreme Court agreed in a unanimous decision. If America is the sinking ship, then these arguments are the deck chairs.
Totally agree on the antisemitism points—the way that the platform is manipulating it's algorithm to shape opinions is very nefarious in that it's subtle and becomes difficult to prove directly. But researchers look deeper and deeper, they've been able to find evidentiary smoking guns. I would posit that there are many clues hiding in plain sight that have not been looked into yet.
Anyways, I would have expected a lot more discussion around the points that you and I bring up (points of actual consequence) rather than what I'm currently seeing on HN.