I could see a malicious recommendation algorithm being a large problem, but even if that did exist there is no way they would show that. By malicious, I mean o

I could see a malicious recommendation algorithm being a large problem, but even if that did exist there is no way they would show that. By malicious, I mean one that identifies content and then recommends it in a way that would achieve a goal people would not support TikTok openly supporting. The simplest is if it automatically ranked content as pro or anti China and used that to influence the recommendations, so for two similar pieces of content with regards to what the user has indicated they want to see, the more pro-china one would be shown. A small bias would be hard to detect and wouldn't achieve much for any given person, but given tens of millions of users over a few years and it would cause a noticeable shift. Other options include slightly promoting content that would cause a social/moral decay in targeted countries. Examples of that would include a slight favoritism to content that promotes violence as a means for conflict resolution or a disregard of a users age when deciding to show or allow for upload more purient content. Once again, almost no impact on a single user, but potentially enough to cause a social shift. That's not to say any of this is happening. I was just coming up with hypothetical ways an intelligent enough recommendation/moderation algorithm could be harmful even without the whole data collection aspect.