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The "great firewall of China" and the TikTok ban are very different beasts.

China originally curtailed predominant Western IT giants from domestic Chinese spread because otherwise these preexistant Western IT giants would fill the void of domestic Chinese IT and remove any room for competition, rendering the PRC dependent on entities like Microsoft, Google, etc..

Furthermore, it's well known that "social media" and search engines, e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn (Meta), Google, are instruments of Western intelligence agencies---essentially, the privatization and commercialization of the Western equivalents to STASI. There are deep ties betwixt ostensibly private corporations like Google, Meta, X Corp., and agencies such as the NSA. These obfuscations are intentional.

TikTok, on the other hand, is not a giant data-collection apparatus designed to index and aggregate everything about you: your family, your friends, your job, the places you frequent, interests+opinions you have, your political+sociopolitical ties, the music you listen to, the movies you like, the hobbies you enjoy, etc. etc. etc..

Could there be an argument that TikTok is used for propaganda purposes? Certainly. But, in making such argument, the US government is implicitly admitting that the same is true for services provided by corporations like Google, Meta, X Corp., et al..

RE: https://mastodon.de/users/ErikUden/statuses/112098573522043034