They got the same version of the app that people in China got. I haven't seen any formal studies but my impression, at the time, was that Chinese people were far better informed about the US than Americans were about China.
(reminded of ex-tech influencer Naomi Wu, who basically went dark with a post along the lines of "the police have told me to stop posting")
That's HSK2 being generous, if you had to plug it into Google Translate, how can you say you know more than the people who speak the language and live there?
but of course. the benchmark is minor influencer and HN darling naomi wu.
As a baseline, they have experience living in about twice as many countries as the locals. They picked up their lives, often learned a second language, and established a home with minimal social support. They tend to be highly motivated people.
In many cases, they know more about the country than the locals do because they've traveled all over said country while the locals never left their home town.
edit: I just realized this might be confusing. By "foreigner" I mean someone who is from a place other than where they currently live. I'm not referring to people who only know about a country through hearsay.
In any case, I think it also applies to some degree to people who live outside the US just purely based on media diet. We all see clips of CNN and MSNBC and Fox on YouTube, but a person elsewhere will have the additional perspective of BBC, Al Jazeera, Le Monde, The Guardian, etc.