I don’t know that I’m particularly enthused about either country’s ideology, hence my more skeptical view of the idea that any of the major US social media networks are “better”.
Could you go into more detail about your thoughts on "[each] country’s ideology" and why you think that makes their social networks (which IMHO are a form of media) roughly equivalently desirable?
IMHO, the US does have faults and does do bad things, but those bad things are usually domestically controversial (to some degree). Since it's a liberal democracy, that controversy is tolerated, which means there's a path to something better. China's government, on the other hand, is pretty unrepentant about the bad things it does, and explicitly rejects and suppresses the mechanisms that could lead positive change in those areas. If the OP is correct and China's government sees itself in an ideological war with the West and its ideas of liberal democracy, then I'd expect that Chinese social networks will be drafted to serve in that war, either now or in the future.
If I dislike beef, I might not be enthusiastic about eating a steak, but I'd still prefer that to some chicken cooked in motor oil.
From the outside, I think Americans generally over-estimate the degree to which modern America is actually a liberal democracy. The tolerated range of speech seems to in reality run a perilously narrow gamut from "neo-conservative" to "arch-neo-conservative", with anything left of the former routinely subject to exercises of state force to attack and undermine that dissent in practice (declarations of turning the nebulous self-applied label of "Antifascist" into a "terror organization", COINTELPRO, etc, etc), regardless of what freedoms are claimed to be enshrined in the US constitution.
And this is merely its internal opposition to liberal democracy; again, even a cursory glance at modern Latin American history demonstrates that the US happily prefers right-wing dictators to democratically elected leftists, if the latter is at all detrimental to the US government's interests.
Consider that if you use TikTok anything you post will show up in your dossier should you ever visit China, even as a tourist. And you're giving that info freely, better hope the CCP doesn't decide to use it against you while you're there to make a political statement. They've done and are doing far worse over less.
Again, I do not reside in the US and do not imagine that the NSA is on "my side", so obviously I'm going to take a more jaundiced view of surveillance apps of US origin.
> Consider that if you use TikTok anything you post will show up in your dossier should you ever visit China, even as a tourist.
Yes. This is equally true of the US. You are ordered to disclose all social media accounts at the border, and can and will be denied entry to the country if your social media posts contain political statements (or even apolitical statements) that the interviewing officer objects to, whether posted by you or merely sent to you: https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/27/border-deny-entry-united-s..., https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-16810312, etc
