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There are reports that they want to sell the US branch to Musk as a contingency if their appeal to the Supreme Court doesn't work. So this whole thing might wind up making things even worse.

Nah, bad.

I don't think TikTok shutting down is great for its users (of which I am one). There are genuine areas of concern but I have concerns about US based social platforms as well.

It's hard to unpick these thoughts and it's harder to decide what a good outcome would look like.

Looking at a lot of user's feeds, its algo doesn't feel as "rage-baity" as the ones from YT or Insta. Even normal platforms, like FB and Twitter push rage bait to the top. TikTok seems to avoid those pitfalls in a lot of cases.

Anecdotally, I can confirm.

In general the algorithm seems flexible to me; on TikTok I find it easy to scroll away or flag unwanted content as "do not show again"; and in my experience the algorithm adjusts well to that.

I feel like as an individual user, I'd rather have my social media data siphoned off by a foreign government than my own. On a societal level, having everyone's data siphoned off by a foreign government and being subjected to political influence is undesirable.