It is more in line with a puppet, that has zero understanding of anything, being told what to say as it is convenient.

Yeah, the super obvious political stunt was a political stunt. It only fools those that don’t pay any attention or don’t know how anything works. Biden said he would not enforce the order, that trump signed during his first term, to ban tiktok. Then tiktok chose to shut itself down for a day and chose to turn itself back on with its political pandering notice. It is all to manipulate it’s users while also paying fealty to the incoming president (because China knows that is how easy he is to control).

Where did I see the “rule” of comic books where the main villain starts as a good guy and after a friend of the hero…

Right?! RIP Intel haha

China would have more of an investment in the information on people they DO care to get than the US would have on any information scraps it could collect from tiktok that it doesn’t already have from hundreds of other sources.

That is actually a really funny point I hadn’t thought of.

It can be a corporate move to out competition AND also improve security. These are not mutually exclusive.

It isn’t about you. China doesn’t care about you. If they have a computer tracking cell network info of groups of soldiers, they can glean actionable information about US military posture. They can do large-scale data analysis on the information they have and get a startling amount of information. They can also use it as a vector for injecting their favorite form of aggression against the US, soft power. They can’t defeat the US in a fight, but economic and cultural warfare is a vulnerability in the US where the battleground is far more level. The incoming administration has indicated it plans to further increase the US’s military strength, which is functionally untouchable as it stands and is more than ready for the fight nobody plans to bring against it, while weakening the actual fight we are seeing. The US is objectively safer, however little, against the machinations of the CCP with tiktok gone, but it is a band-aid on a firehose. Also, the CCP is clearly ready for that move given the move to Redbook, likely stoked by CCP operators under the guise of “haha let’s go to another Chinese app, that’ll show 'em!” because Americans are very easy to predict and manipulate…they are born and raised to be manipulated. It’s rough, but quite interesting to see play out.

We have a puppet coming into the presidency. China will have all the inroads to our government they care to pay for. Tencent and Co. will be a non-issue.