Much of the discourse seems to assume that only one thing can be true, either TikTok is a heinous scheme by the CCP or they are the scapegoat for Facebook, etc.

Much of the discourse seems to assume that only one thing can be true, either TikTok is a heinous scheme by the CCP or they are the scapegoat for Facebook, etc. I assert that multiple things can be true at once, but no single claim is unambiguously true in all its details. Consider: - China is certainly intensely ambitious, and has provably engaged in economic espionage for decades (as has the West, but perhaps with considerably more subtlety). - Chinese business leaders know that to disobey the government is to risk their personal security. So if the government were to ask ByteDance to do something, it very much would be done. - The Western political elites desperately need an enemy to distract from the fact that their economic model is failing millions of their citizens. It wasn't China that stole the jobs. It was McKinsey that advised the board to send them there. - one of the brightest spots in the US is technology. You think Zuckerberg and Musk dont have senators on speedial? They do not need a competitor eating their lunch. Unlike Insta and whatsapp, facebook cant buy their way out of their failure to innovate. They need to make tiktok go away asap. What could be easier than riding the anti china sentiment, which is happily bipartisan? To be clear, I do not approve of many of the Chinese government's policies. But to whip TikTok when the Valley is strip mining your personal data every day seems pretty unfair.