This overlooks the "possibility" that those platforms have an "agreement" of sorts with the US Government. The Twitter Files have gone into some of that, but be careful: it is possible for things to exist that each individual/civilian may not have knowledge of, even though most people seem to be strongly under the impression that this is impossible, perhaps because it could be considered (or, has been marketed as) [only] a conspiracy theory.
> This is really meant to be a punch in the fight against China. US government does not want any possibility of US citizens' data being in the hands of China and their questions to Chew made that clear. The narrative of child safety, for example the story about the kid who commit suicide because of their "for you" page, is being used as a kind of legal "pretext" so they can ban TikTok.
It is plausible that there are certain ideas that they would not like the minds of the American Public exposed to, certain conversations they would prefer they do not have, etc. There is a surprising amount of detail to reality, but we miss out on most of it (and often do not realize it), for a variety of reasons.
The thinking on these sorts of matters one reads in this thread is rather eye opening....I suspect a lot of the styles of logic that are perfectly acceptable in threads on this topic would be very unwelcome when writing software.
