These aren't just ideas, these are adversarial fingers on the scale, particularly in a country that has a nearly 50/50 schism. Then there are the intelligence p

These aren't just ideas, these are adversarial fingers on the scale, particularly in a country that has a nearly 50/50 schism. Then there are the intelligence possibilities. There is potentially geolocation, timing information, visual information, identifier based information, text scraping based information, artifact information, and social graph information. When and where a person sleeps, commutes, works, and vacations. Who shows up in my pictures and contact list, potentially how close those relationships are. What types of devices might show up on my network. It's possible to potentially connect a TikTok account to other public accounts based on links, shares, text, or other content. I don't now what an apps ability to scrape through photos on a phone in the background is, but even a hash on every photo could be used to identify anyone who has a non public photo on their phone. Direct messages are their own treasure trove. You might be able to fingerprint the device or collect version information which might make landing a vulnerability on a particular target easier. If I gave you the TikTok database and a function that will control what shows up in peoples feeds, I don't think it's very hard to imagine ways to create civil unrest, promote a friendly politician, identify military members, identify politicians, identify politicians children, diminish trust in public institutions, increase hopelesness/depression, drive up hatred to outgroups (people of a different gender race or sexual preference), or drive up hatred towards police. We are living in an age where the ideas of objective truth and intellectual authority are gone. Nuance is dead. Everyone can choose their own reality. Presenting emotionally satisfying, yet ultimately destructive realities to people seems like the type of thing that can become quite problematic. As a side note, from an ideological point of view, I am against banning TikTok, but it's hard not to see that it is the pragmatically correct thing to do. Certainly if China were to invade Taiwan, I think pragmatic concerns would exceed ideological ones.