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China can benefit without doing any influencing. It can simply mine the vast amount of data it gets for sentiment analysis. Say they want to be more aggressive against the Philippines. They can do an analysis to gauge the potential outrage on the part of the American people. If it's low they can go ahead.

China can show favorable political content to America and American youth.

American culture has been such an influencing force on the world due to our conduits, movies and music. TikTok is a Chinese conduit, and I do believe this is happening. Our culture can be co-opted, the Chinese had John Cena apologize to ALL of China. They can easily pay to have American influencers spin in a certain way, influencing everything.

Thank you for this concise and comprehensive summary. The DDoS threat had never occurred to me.

So China blocking US social media is justified for the very same reasons?

China has blocked US social media for years (decades perhaps?). I don't know if they've explicitly said all the reasons, but "social stability" is a big one.

As an aside, TikTok itself is banned in China.