Right, Congress was shown some pretty convincing evidence that execs in China pull the strings, and those execs are vulnerable to Chinese government interference.

As we’ve seen in the past couple of weeks, social media companies based in the US are also vulnerable to US government interference — but that’s the way they like it.

That may be true in a legal sense (and my reading of that is the same as yours).

My interpretation of the parent’s comment is that we have pretty serious (and dubiously legal) overreach on this in a purely domestic setting as well.

As someone who has worked a lot on products very much like TikTok, I’d certainly argue that we do.

There are so many reasons.

- China can access military personnel, politically exposed persons, and their associates. Location data, sensitive kompromat exfiltration, etc.

- China can show favorable political content to America and American youth. They can influence how we vote.

- China could turn TikTok into a massive DDoS botnet during war.

- China doesn't allow American social media on its soil. This is unequal trade and allows their companies to grow stronger.

- China can exert soft power, exposing us to their values while banning ours from their own population.

Exactly, these are hostile political actors interfering in our country. This is also why Facebook and X should be banned everywhere except the USA.

Yes, there is a distinction there. The issue is that it's a small part of the overall problem when looked at the larger scale. The overarching issues of political influence at odds with individual citizens, hostile engagement-maximizing algorithms, adversarial locked-down client apps, and selling influence to the highest bidder are all there with domestically-incorporated companies. The government's argument basically hinges on "but when these companies do something really bad we can force domestic companies to change but we can't do the same for TikTok". That's disingenuous to American individuals who have been on the receiving end of hostile influence campaigns for over a decade, disingenuous to foreign citizens not in the US or China who can't control any of this, and disingenuous to our societal principles as we're still ultimately talking about speech.

That can’t be it. Facebook sells the same data to foreign adversaries including China and Russia. The most famous incident involved the British company Cambridge Analytica, which used it to manipulate election outcomes in multiple countries:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica...

Edit: Apparently it’s not common knowledge that this is still happening. Here’s a story about a congressional investigation from 2023:

https://www.scworld.com/analysis/developers-in-china-russia-...

And here’s a story about an executive order from Biden the next year. Apparently the White House concluded that the investigation wasn’t enough to fix the behavior:

https://www.thedailyupside.com/technology/biden-wants-to-sto...

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/28/politics/americans-person...

Edit 2: Here’s a detailed article from the EFF from this month explaining how the market operates: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/online-behavioral-ads-...

It's still completely legal for Meta to sell that user data to Chinese owned companies. So no security is provided by this change. I see it as theatre.

It seems pretty bold to assume that Google, Facebook, Amazon, X, etc aren't adversaries. Foreign or otherwise.