> This can be used an argument for banning all media.

No, because to be clear, the worry is that people (mostly: young teens) don't have any conception of Tiktok being a CCP mouthpiece.

Anyone reading China Daily is going to realize it's a Chinese news source. And, as far as the American government is concerned, that is adequate to inform a citizen's decision-making with regards to how they interpret content from that source. People in the US don't tend to read China Daily — and it's not because the US government prevents them from doing so, or even tells them not to.

But there's nothing about Tiktok that looks Chinese. The content isn't Chinese; the UI isn't Chinese; it doesn't run sponsored ads from Chinese companies; even the PR announcements and interviews are usually done by Caucasian, ethnically-American "figurehead" employees. The whole company wants to portray itself as if it was an arms'-length American subsidiary of a foreign company, rather than a plain-old foreign company. There is no level of "media literacy" that you can apply to interacting with Tiktok itself, that would enable you to realize that Tiktok might slipstream CCP propaganda into your feed at some point. To realize that, you have to research the app "out of band" — which is research that the average citizen (but esp. a teenager) has no motivation to do.

To put this another way: the US government would likely be perfectly fine with Douyin being exposed to Western audiences; or with Tiktok and Douyin being merged together, such that logging into Tiktok shows both Tiktok and Douyin content (but presumably doesn't allow American comments to filter back up to Chinese posters, for CCP reasons.) Americans would sign up for this app, and immediately be barraged by the majority-Chinese content already on the platform — and so would quickly realize that this is a Chinese app, with all that that implies.

This is how, for example, WeChat is. Its design and messaging makes it clear that it's the international version of a Chinese app. The default phone country code on signup is +86, even for the release of the app published in the US App Store. When you see signs saying "we accept WeChat Pay", those signs are usually printed once in English and then again in Chinese, even in countries without much of a Chinese population. Etc. Nobody thinks that WeChat is an American company. And so the US government has never considered banning WeChat — and likely never would, even in wartime. They'd trust US citizens to avoid it of their own volition.

> On the other hand, I consider it a very scary thing that the US state department is just going to ban any media platform that cannot be effectively controlled.

Not "that cannot be controlled"; specifically "can and likely will be controlled for malicious purposes, by a state actor who the US is planning to go to war with quite soon, and who has proven to have competent propaganda and cyberwar arms."

The US would never ban a media platform hosted in e.g. the UAE — no matter how much of a propaganda mouthpiece it might be for non-aligned interests — because the US has no plans to go to war with the UAE; and so the US has no reason to predict that the UAE itself would coerce a platform run by one of their own private companies, into doing psy-ops on Americans.

Likewise, the US has no strong desire to ban entirely-uncontrollable-by-anybody media platforms, like certain anonymous p2p chat clients. If there's no central lever that anyone can pull to turn the platform systematically toward being a psy-op machine (with nobody noticing), then it's not the concern of the US DHS to defend people from it.

> We might as well just admit that China was right to ban Google/Meta.

China was right to ban Google/Meta, precisely insofar as China also believes war with the US is imminent. In the event of a war, these US-owned platforms would almost certainly be used by the US to manipulate Chinese citizens, in exactly the same way Tiktok would be used against US citizens. There's no reason not to use this tactic as part of a war, if you have the know-how. Both the US and China have the know-how.

(I hope people the world over wake up one day and realize that they the only "safe" social media platform, is one hosted in — and with legal ownership by a company headquartered in — a neutral country like Switzerland or Austria, that explicitly intends to never make war with anybody, and so has no need for a foreign propaganda arm!)

> individual freedoms

I would note that it won't be illegal to access Tiktok. Tiktok would still exist in every country other than the US. So the ban on Tiktok would be more like an EPA-mandated "hazard zone" fence around a site, than like an FDA scheduling of a controlled substance.

A hazard-zone declaration stops any business in the zone from operating there (illegal to make your employees work in a hazard zone); and also disincentivizes unknowing individuals from entering the zone by mistake. But you can just, like, climb the fence. You're not going to be arrested; a hazard zone is not inherently private property, so you are not trespassing by entering it. You're just (likely) being an idiot, and voiding any insurance claims you'll make. But maybe you have some very specific reason to go there. Maybe you're filming a documentary. You can still do that.

Likewise, it won't be illegal to download a VPN, set it to (any country other than the US), switch to that same region of the App Store, download Tiktok, and sign up / log into it. You're jumping the hazard-zone fence, but there's no crime inherent in that. As an individual, you're free to do so. It's just a fence, to keep out the people who don't have a motivation to be there that exceeds the motivation to ignore some scary warnings and climb a fence.

(Compare and contrast: quarantined subreddits, which are basically the self-policing version of this at a sub-platform level.)