I don't think I've seen anything other than yellow scare adjacent innuendo that TikTok actually has any nefarious meddling in their algorithm to push different

I don't think I've seen anything other than yellow scare adjacent innuendo that TikTok actually has any nefarious meddling in their algorithm to push different types of content to American vs Chinese users. Youtube and Facebook have both shown that basic heuristics like showing the user things more likely to keep them on the site and interacting is more than enough to form "radicalization pipelines". As for the current consensus reality split in the US and other parts of the world I think that issue has been present and rotting at the center of mass media long before TikTok came around. There's also a big observational bias in our current issues where everything is easily documented and distributed we're able to know about all our neighbor's crazy beliefs and the same for people around the world, so maybe our consensus has always been a lot looser than we imagined we just see the crazies more these days (and the crazies see more of each other of course letting them build a wonderful little alt-reality bubble). I will agree it's definitely much easier for kooks and grifters willing to indulge them to make a buck to find each other these days which has hypercharged the issue.