Tiktok was about only one thing and that was Israel losing the narrative war as unlike most of western social media which was deranking and censoring showing of Israeli atrocities to the world Tiktok was not.
Same reason Elon bought Twitter.
Money is money, but convincing people is power.
TikTok Agrees to Sell U.s. Operations, https://www.tiktok.com/en/trending/detail/tiktok-agrees-to-s... , 25 Dec 2022
Biden approves banning TikTok from federal government phones, https://www.npr.org/2022/12/20/1144519602/congress-is-about-... , 20 Dec 2022
U.S. is 'looking at' banning TikTok and Chinese social media apps, Pompeo says, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/07/us-looking-at-banning-tiktok... , 7 July 2020
It's unthinkable that any free nation would allow a fairly oppressive and powerful entity to have that kind of power.
China had (has) it's own police force in Canada, monitoring ex-pats and students, and very actively monitors nationals and ex-nationals, they us research funding to leverage acquiescence on those kinds of things on campus etc..
Media, Finance and other 'core industries' are protected everywhere, the only place it's less visible is the US, because they haven't needed to - the nation is huge relative to it's peers.
Instead of being TikTok specific, most nations should have foreign surveillance rules and they should be applied much more severely to the extent that those nations are authoritarian / totalitarian etc..
China should not be allowed to own any media entities in the West, full stop.
Most nations should definitely ban US Social Media companies from hosting certain kinds of data, have some domiciling rules that protect form CLOUD act etc..
All of that proportional to the risk and general concerns; obviously the US represents a risk vector of greater proportion than in 2008, so rules need to adjust.
As an american, I'm already used to that from my own government.
The 'National Security Ghouls' are those arresting people for comments such as yours, putting them into camps, cutting access to information, disabling travel or access to services, shutting down expression and dissent, intervening in judicial affairs, arresting journalists, telling students what they cannot say, threatening and intimidating ex-pats etc..