[germinator]

"Direct" is not a helpful word.

In the US, the government has control over the content too, it just so happens that it mostly concerns itself with combatting certain moral vices (from prostitution to bootleg fireworks) - although to be fair, it also lightly pressured big tech into combatting political "misinformation".

In China, the same mechanisms exist, except the controls on speech are much tighter and the punishments more severe. Every other tech company operating there has a story of officials showing up with demands or threatening employees. I worked at two places where this happened. In addition, most businesses operate as formal or quasi-formal public-private partnership, where the CCP has officials within the corporate management structure. Again, ask anyone who tried to start a foreign-owned business in China.

You can make a reasonable argument that having an oppressive and geopolitically adversarial foreign government effectively in control of the most popular youth social media platform in the country is not great. Or you can make a reasonable free-trade argument. Free trade works only if all participants follow the rules; if Western social media can't operate on their market, they don't get to operate on ours.

There are things to dislike about the US government, but I really don't get the contrarian takes on TikTok. China is objectively worse and its government's legitimacy and lasting power is built in the bodies of tens of millions of victims. We're not getting along right now. This doesn't require cynicism to explain.