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I have a couple questions:

1) How is TikTok worse than other social media apps? Both in terms of privacy and "the algorithm".

2) What another country's government does with my data is far less important to me than what my government is doing with my data. Am I wrong for thinking that?

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Exactly. The scariest part to me is that an unelected, partisan, US intelligence agency literally moderates the content on social media through their own purpose-made moderation portals[1], than anything China is doing.

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[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23129270-fb-portal

People here worried about tiktok seem to be in denial about how the USA has treated the internet (not to mention our constitutional rights, specifically the fourth amendment) for the last 20+ years.

There are no privacy laws of consequence when the people running the show report to no one and have zero oversight, yet they want us to worry about tiktok and China instead of pay attention to the gross violation of our rights by our own government.

I’m not making strong claims, but I think it’s a fairly simple formula.

1) Do you believe social media algorithms can have large negative outcomes concerning human social behavior?

2) Does the entity controlling those algorithms then matter assuming 1 is true?

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