The fact that many Westerners are still unsure about this and not aware that they're in the middle of an unconventional war¹ is fascinating. Xi does not care ab

The fact that many Westerners are still unsure about this and not aware that they're in the middle of an unconventional war¹ is fascinating. Xi does not care about memes of course. The app itself is the backdoor, Bytedance (which has the Communist Party right inside the company, like other Mainland corporations) controls what the users see. And what they're shown is completely different from Douyin, there is a reason Chinese residents aren't even permitted to download TikTok - the foreign propaganda version. No one will be able to tell you their strategy for certain but it's not hard to guess when you look at the content that gets boosted. It's like Twitter on steroids, it's designed to cause division and radicalize the users. The data harvesting is an added bonus and with more data they can be better manipulated. Btw on a meta level this doesn't matter when the CCP has completely walled 1.4 billion people in. Every single American social media app is banned, the vast majority of foreign news sites is censored. It should not even be a question what the app is about, the regime is as obvious an enemy to free society as it gets and before they open up as was promised in the past in exchange for economic investment, no Chinese internet company should be permitted operating anywhere. While the Chinese internet is so tightly controlled and the US & co are attacked in Chinese state media on a daily basis, foreign countries let them move in this Trojan horse. There's a book called Unrestricted Warfare where the authors describe just this sort of weakness of the US to political/information warfare 20 years ago. It turns out they were spot on. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_warfares https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_warfares