Having talked with legislators and staffers on both sides of the aisle about this issue, they are massively concerned about having a foreign adversary with the capability to inject social commentary and promote propaganda into 150 million americans media stream.
The fact that this legislation helps american companies by fucking over bytedance and by proxy the pride of the CCP is just icing on the cake.
Replace "foreign adversary" with "American" and you have the status quo. This is the problem with the national security angle: when powerful Americans manipulate people into doing things against their own interest, sow discord in the public sphere, manipulate elections, buy officials, or engage in mass data collection it's somehow not a threat to "national security".
Domestic powers have far more reach than China and have done what is functionally the same as a foreign destabilization/misinformation campaign. The politicians aren't concerned about it because they are in the club; they benefit. The real losers from TikTok are the political/economic elite because this is competition for them. To the average person a successful destabilization/misinformation/manipulation campaign would just be a bit more of what we already have.
The US also doesn’t have laws requiring companies to assist in intelligence collection. Even FISA courts have a process and follow specific legal procedures, which have been fought successfully when those requests are overly vague.
We also have laws protecting US citizens from our intelligence agencies acting within the country, unless for counter intelligence or anti terrorism, which are done by domestic law enforcement.
Huh? PRISM? CLOUD ACT?
"Why not Facebook?" people say. Well for one, absolutely why not ban facebook? They've already been caught trying to manipulate depressed teens without their permission. Arguably they should be under US jurisdiction and force of law, so you could claim we could at least restrain their ability to manipulate Americans, but we haven't exactly done that, and most powerful Americans seem to only care that they aren't manipulating the right people. If TikTok made an American subsidiary that was somehow fully out of reach of the CCP, then I would begrudgingly be okay with not banning it.
I think that the short form, low effort, high noise environment of TikTok serves to make it more difficult to tell high quality information from low quality information, and that the "just keep watching the next video" format discourages you from actively thinking about what you just watched. I think these outcomes might not have been intentional, but I don't like them being normalized.
The best example of this that I know about is the user Miniminuteman. He's a historian and/or archeologist who did tiktok stuff and eventually moved to do more stuff on Youtube. His tiktok content was short, high tempo stuff where you basically had to take his "debunks" of misinformation at face value, and trust his exact words, because that's all you can really put into a tiktok if you want to do well. Whereas his Youtube content is long form and goes really in depth to actually debunk historical misinformation, and has much more time and content to cite references, explain WHY something is inaccurate, explain how information came to be, and dig into a lot more detail. That detail is important in debunking stuff, because without it you are just another hot take.