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.
Pretty much how I feel about it. There was a point where I was upset from a privacy standpoint, but somewhere along the way I realized that if China really wants my info they can probably easily get it from one of the many databrokers who almost certainly have my entire life on file; and doing so would likely provide them with more info on who I am than tiktok ever could.
At this point I’m more concerned about how the CCP might be manipulating the app’s algorithms and to what end. I don’t use tiktok, so take this with a grain of salt, but my understanding is that Chinese tiktok tends to be very wholesome with trends that tend to highlight people’s talents and skills, while western tiktok tends to be very cancerous with destructive or (ironically) anti-social trends that keep popping up. It seems odd that the quality of socialization would vary so dramatically. Maybe westerners are just really shitty compared to people living in China, or maybe China’s social credit system just makes that much of a difference, but I find it hard to believe that westerners are really that different from people in China. I find it hard to believe that there isn’t some amount of manipulation going on, either on China’s side (skewed to make people in China look better) or the international side (skewed to make westerners look worse).