Regardless of whether one would necessarily argue China's ownership of Tiktok is worse than Musk's ownership of Twitter, is you're in the US, China is a foreign adversary. Any country would be nuts to have one of their biggest media distribution channels (especially the way Tiktok's algorithm works) be owned by their largest rival.

It's simple. They're "Communist." Anti-capitalist. Anti-Christian. The United States, which sees itself as the righteous inheritor of Western civilization, founded as the New Jerusalem by God himself, which single-handedly won World War 2, has considered itself the existential enemy of communism since the Cold War, and stoking fears of the "Red Menace" has always been effective on the American populace, particularly the parts with really sensitive hearing.

We tried to do the same trick with Islam post 9/11 and it was somewhat effective but it didn't have quite the same resonance. Which is weird because there's a long history of Black Marxist activism in the US, and of Black Muslim activism in the US, and you'd think if anything could convince Americans to hate and fear something, it's that thing's utility to Black liberation. But for some reason Islamophobia just seems to have been folded into the same generic antiwoke xenophobic white supremacist milieu as everything else, while people still jump on tables and go "eek!" at the thought of commie mind control.