> This is only an opinion you can hold if you view the US as exclusively a pious organization that can do no wrong.

No? I think you're engaging in very black-and-white thinking yourself. The spectrum from "utopia" to "dystopia" is very wide. I don't think the US is anywhere near the "utopia" side; but China is much further toward the "dystopia" side.

A country is an effective dystopia, to the degree that, among other things, its citizens are:

• manipulated by the state into not realizing the bad things the state does (both locally and on the world stage);

• manipulated by the state into developing a negatively-biased view of countries that oppose that country in conflicts (usually involving many entirely-false beliefs about those countries), where countries neutral to those conflicts would not support those views;

• and controlled + influenced by the state into not visiting other countries where they could "learn the truth."

China does all three of these things, in the strongest and most active sense. News companies are state-owned or coerced. Citizen journalists are arrested. Individuals sharing things they shouldn't are arrested. People have low social credit scores and can't leave the country by default, and have to earn their way out by presenting as brainwashed. Etc.

The US, meanwhile, does some of these things, but in much weaker senses:

• the US very well probably manipulates its own mainstream media; but it does nothing to prevent access to foreign news sources (where, again, Tiktok is not a foreign news source — you can't learn anything about China on Tiktok. But you can still read CCP-mouthpiece Chinese MSM outlets like https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/ just fine.)

• the US suppresses virally-disseminated citizen journalism in the sense of telling social-media services to blacklist keywords in their recommendation algorithms; but they aren't arresting the people who post those things. There is no risk in the US to spreading samizdat — in fact, there is no concept in the US of samizdat, because there is no news or fact that will get you arrested by sharing it. Anyone who wants can join a group chat (even one hosted on a US-based service!) about these topics, and spread info there without a problem. People can put up posters or even run billboards calling for people to join these meetings, and the government won't go around tearing them down. (This is what your much-underappreciated right to "freedom of assembly" gets you!)

• Random US citizens have no trouble visiting other countries — even the countries the US doesn't like. You can buy a plane ticket to Beijing right this moment if you like. A US citizen can also legally visit Russia, despite the global sanctions (though you'll have to fly to a neighbouring country and come in via land.) In neither case will this get you in trouble with the US government. It won't even disrupt an application for security clearance.

(Also, if you're curious, I'm not American. I'm Canadian. Here in Canada, we have things like hate-speech laws. We believe that there is such a right as "freedom of speech", but that it can come into opposition of other rights — such as the right to one's own safety. Or the right to a fair election.)

> Why does the TikTok ban suddenly have so much support when they were the only platform to not explicitly mute pro-palestine voices?

Past performance is not indicative of future results. Especially when the past performance is in peacetime, and the future results are in wartime.

Which is to say: IMHO the CCP has not yet done any kind of real manipulation through Tiktok. In fact, they've likely encouraged ByteDance to be perfect little boy-scouts and build up as much social trust among Gen Z and Gen Alpha as possible. (Whereas Facebook et al likely were told by the US government to suppress certain sentiments.)

The thing the US government fears — the thing any US citizen should fear — isn't any already ongoing manipulation on Tiktok. The thing you should worry about, is what Tiktok would be able to be used as by the CCP, the moment the US starts shooting at China. Tiktok is the corporate equivalent of a sleeper agent. And anyone who believes that a war between the US and China is inevitable, wants to get that sleeper agent out of the room before they wake up.