alt Hacker NewsThere were National Security ghouls pushing a TikTok ban as far back as 2020 because of the "China bad" angle, but it didn't really become a widespread and bipartisan concern until after the latest round of massacres amped up in Gaza and USAians started seeing atrocities on TikTok.
China is bad. It's a hyper authoritarian state using information collected from accounts for nefarious purposes, including informing their influence campaigns, targeting and they were censoring for specific issues.
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.