So you agree that the Chinese government is doing the right thing when they block a Chinese citizen from viewing Twitter?
You agree with the usage of the Great Firewall? You agree with the ability for the government to tell you what websites you can visit? If you use a VPN to read a Chinese newspaper article, you agree that the government should be allowed to imprison you and take all of your possessions? That's madness IMO.
Like I said, things "should be handled carefully and potentially outlawed." Personally I don't think your comparison holds because Twitter for instance isn't controlled by a state actor so the geopolitical issues don't really apply (unless you consider Elon controlled by China because of his dependencies on their critical mineral supply chains and market for Tesla... or by Saudi because of their funds ownership in Twitter).
I don't think the hyperbole here is particularly helpful; there is clearly a national security risk to allowing a foreign competitor unfettered access to your market and control over what amounts to a major media property. Maybe you believe that this doesn't matter and shouldn't be addressed, but if you do believe it should be addressed in some way, you need the legal framework to be able to do so
1) Twitter is not an arm of the US government in the way that Tiktok and most Chinese companies are.
2) The law is not calling for the information on Tiktok to be banned. For instance, an image of a tweet saying "fuck Xi Jinping" could not be viewed in China, but an image/video of a tiktok saying "fuck biden" would be fine to view in America.
3) Tiktok is not benign like a book is. It extracts information from the user and sends it to the company servers.
4) It is trivial to use the platform to perform psyops; the company could easily mix subtly pro-china content into the feed from time to time.
Re item 1: See [0]. Arguably any corporation involved in government censoring operations (which are by definition extra-judicial) is an active arm of said government. There's a reason people have taken to calling our current state "crony capitalism".
Re item 3: TikTok is worse than that. The recommendation feeds are specifically designed to rot the minds of American citizens. [1]
You agree with the usage of the Great Firewall? You agree with the ability for the government to tell you what websites you can visit? If you use a VPN to read a Chinese newspaper article, you agree that the government should be allowed to imprison you and take all of your possessions? That's madness IMO.
We should be making Super-TOR instead of this.