Sure but the obsession regarding China is leaving everyone vulnerable and blind to the methods being utilized by everyone else. It's not as if TikTok is using some alien technology here that nobody else has access to.

Cambridge Analytica anyone? Did we all just forget? That wasn't even Chinese influence and still it had tremendous impact on the US (and how her citizens view each other).

The US is already influencing US mass psychology, but I guess people are more ok with being manipulated by people who were born in the same border as them, than by people who were born outside that border.

That's a legitimate concern. We've recently had examples of the US government influencing US mass psychology via Twitter, including examples where Twitter was asked to suppress information the government stated was factually correct.

The CCP is trash, and the US government is far better (it has elections, for one thing) but I suggest we should be concerned about any attempt to manipulate the populace.

Yes. At the moment I expect Facebook, Twitter, etc to be focused mainly on using the data they collect to drive engagement and serve more ads. I expect the US government to have relatively weak and ineffective information operations on those platforms because they don't own the platforms and are relatively inexperienced with internet scale information operations. I expect TikTok to be focused mainly on using the data they collect to drive engagement more effectively than previously feasible and serve information operations. I expect the Chinese government to have strong and effective information operations on that platform because in a real sense the government and by extension the Chinese Communist Party does own the platform and have large amounts of experience in internet scale information operations.

America's capitalist class has been doing that since the first newspaper was published.