If you have a problem with that, why limit this to TikTok?
Not that it isn't at least a little reasonable to be wary of adversaries having access to a data collection platform, but the problem also gets meaningfully less substantial in general if you put meaningful limits on these companies' capacity to grow and eat each other in the name of building empires of surveillance capitalism.
Meta in particular is pushing hard on that angle while hand-waving away the fact that Facebook has a history of treating society as a large-scale experiment. It's manipulated users' mental health on purpose, meddled in elections by selling users' data directly to campaigners, and furthered incitements of everything from genocides abroad to the attack on the Capitol. They're feeding into attacks that single out TikTok specifically, as part of a broader pattern that Facebook and Zuckerberg personally have exhibited of trying to buy or clone nearly anything that represents competition. They bought Instagram. They bought WhatsApp. They tried to buy Snapchat. They've lifted the primary functionality of several large competitors, ranging from disappearing messages to basically all of Reels.
Instead of just taking the blunt-instrument approach of banning social media platforms from within the borders of specific foreign countries, we arguably should be having an entirely different conversation about banning the business practices that make TikTok a problem.
1) It's just a lot harder from the legislation's perspective.
2) Other social medias are mainly profit driven, any negative social impact is mainly side effect due to misalignment of incentives. But TikTok is much more likely to intentionally act in a malicious way, so I think the risk not comparable here.
Not that it isn't at least a little reasonable to be wary of adversaries having access to a data collection platform, but the problem also gets meaningfully less substantial in general if you put meaningful limits on these companies' capacity to grow and eat each other in the name of building empires of surveillance capitalism.
Meta in particular is pushing hard on that angle while hand-waving away the fact that Facebook has a history of treating society as a large-scale experiment. It's manipulated users' mental health on purpose, meddled in elections by selling users' data directly to campaigners, and furthered incitements of everything from genocides abroad to the attack on the Capitol. They're feeding into attacks that single out TikTok specifically, as part of a broader pattern that Facebook and Zuckerberg personally have exhibited of trying to buy or clone nearly anything that represents competition. They bought Instagram. They bought WhatsApp. They tried to buy Snapchat. They've lifted the primary functionality of several large competitors, ranging from disappearing messages to basically all of Reels.
Instead of just taking the blunt-instrument approach of banning social media platforms from within the borders of specific foreign countries, we arguably should be having an entirely different conversation about banning the business practices that make TikTok a problem.