While I agree with this, it confuses me that the same isn't happening to Instagram as well, since it has essentially 0 censorship of anti-Israeli content. However, within the last year it seems that there was a deliberate lift in that censorship, with the whole area of the platform blowing up since the early summer.

What I imagine the incentive is is not the ability to censor the media, but to have the media on record of who posts it and who engages with it and maintain that ledger. When people get banned and slandered for denouncing a genocide, it becomes harder and harder to call this stuff "low-IQ conspiracy slop".

This is such conspiracy theory bullshit. The point was that China controlled an algorithm and platform that was capable of manipulating the views of millions of Americans on _any_ topic. Maybe some people cared about Israel especially, but that wasn't the overall reason for trying to get TikTok in the US out of Chinese control.

You can, of course, make the argument that Facebook, Twitter, etc are also similar threats to other countries and _that is why they aren't allowed in China_.

I agree that this resolution is a worst-case-scenario outcome, though.

Why do people keep repeating this point? TikTok bans have been repeatedly considered for a while. It is as a topic in 2020. And October 7 happened in 2023. The reasons to ban it are a lot more simple than a conspiracy relating to Israel.