No one is asking for a great wall around the US. People are just asking that major influencers are not under the control of hostile governments.
It's annoying when people in other countries rile up people to change how they vote, but ultimately, that's a problem with democracy. It's the worst system out there, except for all the others. People not understanding their government is the deeper problem. Does banning TikTok fix this problem? It sounds like we're saying "only opinion columnists who work for The New York Times and Fox News should be able to tell you how to vote and what issues you care about". That's really not great either, is it?
It's really depressing watching the government strip away the rights of women and transgender people. We can't blame social media influence bots for that. It's elected officials that are doing it. TikTok is just a distraction from the true hardcore hatred that we've elected.
This should be a simple yes. External authoritarian governments (Russia's IRA, CCP via bytedance) should not have their thumb on the scale (trollfarms & the algorithm) for what is viewed in western democracies. I'm actually amazed that this view is controversial.
I agree with the rest of your premises, but the above should be a separate issue from them.
The US politicians should look into why that is so, why is that suddenly the US population so easy to "manipulate" away from an ideology it has strongly believed in for more than 200 years, but I guess that would reflect poorly on said politicians (because they're part of the problem).
It seems to me that Xi in China agrees about this, in that they've blocked all those things (except for their own).
> that would reflect poorly on said politicians (because they're part of the problem).
How do you mean? That they too manipulate the population, and are part of a manipulation problem?