> Turns out China (or here, Russia) infiltrated the country, waged an enormous disinformation campaign and succeeded by getting their chosen candidate elected.

But in the US, Russia also has waged enormous disinformation campaigns on US-based social media networks. Taking the problem of foreign (dis|mis)information, election interference, etc seriously requires that we do more than ban one network based on the ownership of that company. After TikTok gets shut down, Chinese influence operations can still use Twitter/X, Meta, Reddit etc. We need better tools and regulations to make these campaigns visible stoppable in real-time, rather than just banning one network while leaving up multiple other vulnerable networks. This ban is political theater, where the US can act like it's doing something while not having to address the harder parts of the problem.

> A. They seem to rather abandon the app rather than receive tens of billions by selling it

I think this is weak evidence of them being a mostly political tool. Valuations based on their actual use are well above what anyone has actually offered to pay. And disentangling US operations from the rest of TikTok would not be straight-forward; do you merely cleave it in two? Given network effects, would cutting off the US component to sell it make both the US and non-US portions less valuable?

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/15/tiktoks-us-unit-could-be-wor...