Asklemmy

The revealed their code to a US company already: Oracle.

They just don't like that the youth use it to see what's happening in other parts of the world, like Palestine. They want to be able to keep the US populace within their propaganda bubble, in the state we were in when we didn't know about things like the Irgun or The Great March of Return.

Guess the issue is that us big bads are blocked in china. So while ccp can leverage social media to monitor western countries. Western goverments can not leverage western social media to do the same in china.

I think the reason is less about "i, an individual, am getting my data harvested" (though certainly still a factor) byt more because China is still very much considered an enemy of the US, and they are not only harvesting americans data in a very invasive way - as in, recording pretty much everything you do on your phone, not just in the app - but an adversarial government now has access to all of that. Additionally, because the chinese "free market" has been effectively neutered in recent years, high chance that the CCP is able to influence TikTok's algorithm to affect what people see and push propaganda. People should be concerned about it in the same way people should be concerned about russian bot farm, but more so, because there isn't an audience of millions feeding russian bot farms their personal information.

As a proud patriot I only want my data sold to American big business interests! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

As an Australian I could not care wjaty the CCP knows about me, happy to send them as many butthole or dick pics photos as they want.

What concerns me is the invasiness of my own national government and its asshole FiveEyes conspirators. They can take my liberty. Those bastards I trust not one inch.

Yeah, I'm much more worried about someone in my country spying on me then China, like what are they gonna do from the other side of the world?

A lot of people exclusively use TT for business, via the TT store, which isn't implemented in other platforms (many of which users don't trust). They'll have a rough go of it if they don't diversify.

I thought they mostly made money through sponsorships rather than direct payments.

I don’t know the specifics behind it, but even if VPN does work, or accessing TT through a web app instead of an app, that’s still 1-2 hurdles for the average user to jump through for their fix.

Some people will just not bother and then peace out to instagram reels or YT shorts or just drop off that kind of social media.

It fully depends on how many users are “savvy” enough to navigate those hurdles and how badly they want to navigate those hurdles.

In my experience when you’re working with a dedicated user base and you make a significant change, you can expect to lose around half your audience. Barriers to entry are probably going to increase that number, but obviously this is anecdotal evidence for future events.