Comment by alisonatwork

I can't speak for Tiktok, but the CCP did explicitly shut down Bytedance's very popular Neihuan Duanzi humor app, and put pressure on them to change the Toutiao algorithm because it was promoting inappropriate content. It's not much of a leap to think that by the time Douyin started getting popular Bytedance had learned their lesson and would proactively moderate their platforms to stay well within the party lines. In theory Tiktok should be independent of that since it targets foreign users, but in practice any media product coming out of a Chinese-owned company is going to be influenced whether explicitly or incidentally by CCP policy.

Of course Americans have the freedom to access thousands of other media outlets not influenced by the CCP, so it seems pretty silly to just restrict this one.