> TikTok/CCP supporters keep dragging it in that direction to avoid the main issue.

You were the one to bring human rights into the conversation: "with one of the worst human rights violations in the modern world".

> It is about an adversarial government

The US has spent the last decade using China as a way to score political points at home, after spending the prior three decades moving the majority of their manufacturing there. China is far from perfect but from my perspective the US have been the ones fostering an adversarial relationship.

> And you have data to support that?

I'll qualify that statement as my personal opinion but from my perspective your politicians just spent a day engaging in an embarrassingly transparent attempt at stoking fear and mistrust. The main result of which was showing the world how deeply incompetent many of them are.

Buddy Carter confidently believes that TikTok is tracking it's users emotional response through pupil dilation but has no comprehension of why you'd need to identify someone's eyes to put a motion tracking filter over them[1]. According to Mr. Carter, TikTok isn't doing enough to protect younger users but thinks that asking a user their age and checking whether or not the users public videos align with the age they declared is "creepy".

Dan Crenshaw used his time to state that Chinese law requires it's citizens to co-operate with their national intelligence agencies. That might have been a good point if not for the fact that TikTok's CEO, the person Crenshaw was questioning, is not Chinese.

Richard Hudson proved himself unable of forming a coherent question as to whether TikTok attempts to access other devices on a WiFi network. Instead asking "So if I have a TikTok app on my phone and my phone is on my home WiFi network, does TikTok access that network?"

> Access to the US population while shutting off US companies unfairly. It is about national security and fair trade.

The average American is at much more risk from their own government's surveillance apparatus than China's. America has never been interested in fair trade, only trade which furthers American interests. There's no "fairness" in a financially poorer country having it's domestic players pushed out of their own markets by companies that can afford to lose more than the country's GDP.

> I was neutral about this when starting out but seeing the same weak pro-TikTok arguments repeated in different forms, have pushed to the other side.

Ah yes, TikTok have been famously adversarial and haven't taken any steps to assuage privacy or security concerns. They aren't a legally separate entity, they aren't already working with Oracle to process US data and they haven't already moved the storage of that data to Oracle's servers in the US either[2]:

> As of October, all new U.S. user data was being stored inside the country. The company started deleting all historic U.S. user data from non-Oracle servers this month, in a process expected to be completed this year, Chew said.

> access to U.S. data is managed by U.S. employees through a separate entity called TikTok U.S. Data Security, which is run independently of ByteDance and monitored by outside observers.

By all means, ban TikTok from the devices of government and security personnel. Banning it entirely will only cool the relationship between China and the US even further, followed by a resulting loss in global influence. The lack of support for the sanctions on Russia proves how much damage the antagonistic approach has already caused.

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/25/tech/tiktok-user-reaction...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZDpJHl6amo

[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-tiktok-ceo-...