“This legislation has a predetermined outcome: a total ban of TikTok in the United States,” a TikTok spokesperson said.
That is patently false. It only bans TikTok if ByteDanse refuses to spin TikTok off and take the control of TikTok outside of China. The company that owns TikTok could be based in very nearly any country other than China, and TikTok would be fine. China already exerts significant direct control over social media that’s inside China; Facebook and Twitter have both been banned because they haven’t been willing to give the Chinese gov’t the level of control that it wants over expressions by users. The concern is that the Chinese gov’t can exert the same level of control over TikTok’s data that they do over Weibo, and that they can for the company to change the way that they feed information to people in order to serve pro-China propaganda to people. That’s a concern in the same way that a social media platform serving pro-Russian propaganda is.