ByteDance is corporated in the Cayman Islands

Yes it is. Why do you think thah TikTok removes that content in the first place? It 's because they are afraid to give paranoid, xenophobic, republicans any "reason" to ban them.

I actuallyethink that you are trying to derail the discussion into "you showld never trust tiktok".

Targeted advertising isn't even on the same playing field of sketchyness as "massive and unchecked data collection by the Chinese government". Even mentioning it in the same sentence seems like an attempt at forum sliding.

And while I agree that the bill is an overreach and absolutely shouldn't go through in it's current form, it's exactly what would be required to achieve your authoritarian stance of banning all social media.

Every US bill includes a lot of other stuff. That's Congress's gig.

The US needs a tighter set of restrictions like what the EU has been passing out lately. But, that doesn't change the fact that ByteDance is a Chinese corporation, under the control of the Chinese government, and has no pretenses of data regulations.

Blah, blah, I hear the same tired argument over and over again about how Google, Facebook, Amazon are just as bad as China. But, it's just not true.

These large corps are definitely something we should paying attention to and they get away with far too much. They should be broken up just like Ma Bell. But, they are still subject to the same data restrictions that the US and the EU have put into law.

TikTok, on the other hand, is owned by a Chinese company, and by extension, the Chinese government. Any data it collects goes straight to the Chinese government. ByteDance, of course, denies this, but the US military, CIA, and other government entities know better, as they have specifically banned the platform for any of their personnel. The data tracking permissions you have to allow on phones is far higher than any other social media platform. It's a more aggressive data collection platform.

TikTok serves a wildly different set of media to the non-Chinese public. It wants to dumb down the non-Chinese population by serving addictive short-form content that hones in on their interests, in a more extreme fashion than any other social media platform, and gets them into a constant loop of video watching for hours and hours.

It abso-fucking-lutely is.