The difference is the Chinese government has a board seat at ByteDance, not to mention soft control via broad government authority over markets. If China wants, boosting content to manipulate US elections or tracking the location of people of interest are things it can easily ask TikTok to do (and has done, apparently).

This is different from the way the US government uses Facebook, for example. It does not have power to boost or demote content, or request location data for people of interest. It can collect far narrower information about people with a warrant, and even then some data it cannot collect (eg. e2ee messaging data).

If CambridgeAnalytica is anything to go by, you can do that with US social media as well. (In terms of influencing elections etc).

True, but it’s disingenuous to fail to acknowledge the difference between that and, say, the US State Department having a board seat at Meta and directing which posts should be boosted on everyones’ feeds.

Nobody cares what happens with your data. They care what happens with the data belonging someone who will some day hold a position of power.

It’s not about the average individual so much as the risk to society.

Let’s say a journalist has published some anti-Chinese material. Through TikTok, the Chinese know where he is precisely.