Comment by JumpCrisscross

> Can't you target people like that on Facebook with ads? Can't you buy data about these people from U.S. data brokers?

Ads have too low of an SNR--you'll blow your cover before getting anything useful. Buying works, but (a) you'd need to be careful about hiding your intentions and (b) it's never going to be as high fidelity as the direct data stream. (Think of the amount of unique data they got from their copy-paste hijacking alone [1].)

Having the data yourself means you can silently query high-fidelity real-time data on a third of the American population. That's difficult to replicate. Again, if you need a familiar bogeyman, consider what the NSA would ask Meta to do if Instagram weren't banned in China.

[1] https://lifehacker.com/is-tiktok-really-recording-everything...