You’re not a government, you’re a person. Either way you’re being manipulated, and the US government definitely doesn’t have your best interests in mind.
The only people thinking in such a arrogantly privileged manner ironically are Westerners, try saying this crap in China or India and people will laugh at you all day. Or I doubt this poster has the best interests of Americans in mind either.
How exactly is that different from a dictatorship?
I'm confused why you think China's interests are irrelevant to you, unless you truly believe geopolitics is a zero-sum game. We compete in markets, militarily in the indo-pacific, and technologically in ways that are not mutually beneficial.
By stifling freedom of expression under the guise of "national security" you're creating blind spots that allow atrocities to go unchallenged. I thought we learned from history but maybe I was wrong.
Because this imaginary world where the US somehow equally controls Facebook on the level that China directly influences TikTok isn’t one that exists?
This low resolution view of the world is grating. “Facebook is a US based social media company so it’s exactly the same as China and TikTok” is completely devoid of the context of reality.
Not only does Facebook actually have 1st amendment speech rights with a judicial system empowered to enforce them. But even the slightest appearance that the US government was attempting to influence speech on Facebook would be a career ending scandal.
Compared to TikTok where the CCP literally has a seat on ByteDance’s board by law and has for its entire existence had its algorithm nuke political topics that China does not want discussed.
It’s not the same thing.
So from where I’m standing it’s the same thing.
And to give you some perspective, there’s plenty of content critical of China on TikTok even though that stuff gets banned on DouYin.