One could come up with dozens of plausible explanations in seconds of thinking: 1) build networks of accounts that amass many followers to facilitate data coll

One could come up with dozens of plausible explanations in seconds of thinking: 1) build networks of accounts that amass many followers to facilitate data collection (scraping public or friend-only profile data, photo, and text) without hitting rate limits, for the purposes of building surveillance-ready profiles of a nation's or the world's citzenry and to build face identification datasets on foreign populations for later use, in other words building a web scraping network in a foreign controlled data ecosystem with mixed privacy settings for non-logged in accounts 2) maintain swaths of accounts with many followers for a "rainy day" when you want to be able to communicate en masse to a nation or language-sphere's populace with subtle propaganda or straight up messaging 3) distract a populace from any matter of subjects or manipulate them to pay attention to the things you want them thinking about / looking at 4) provide cover for #3 by creating such a mass of content that the stuff you really care about is more easily hidden amongst the noise 5) dumb down a foreign population to weaken them economically - everyone knows the Douyin (domestic TikTok) has legal limits in place on allowed content especially for minors that is intended to promote intellectual growth and productivity, there's no such limits on Tiktok, and it wouldn't be hard to imagine they could facilitate the opposite for the PRC's subtle benefit ... I'm just freestyling here and I'm sure I could reach 20 in a matter of 10-20 minutes