There is by now "free speech" being published for every single combination of personal interests, demographic, and personal opinion and personality traits.
If you wanted to push, say, white supremacy, to a trans mountain bike riding sci fi fan -- I am sure the content that will do that job is out there. Not with 100% certainty but enough to control a population. The question about controlling the population is only about picking the right reels to show to whom in what order.
If you control the algorithmic firehose and control who sees what, you basically control the minds of the population.
Not by explicit propaganda. Only by nudging and bumping content.
People can make conscious decisions to not want their worldview defined by traditional sources, whether it is Fox News or The Daily Show or whatever. But with TikTok everyone gets something different and who knows how it is geared or rigged.
As a left-ish person, TikTok is genuinely the only place I feel safe from braindead hate. EVERY OTHER platform I've interacted with has a fuckton of hate.
I'm sure it exists in TikTok too, but at least the algorithm keeps those freaks far away from me.
Can you establish somehow how a TikTok ban would help this situation?
What material effects are those?