The revealed their code to a US company already: Oracle.

They just don't like that the youth use it to see what's happening in other parts of the world, like Palestine. They want to be able to keep the US populace within their propaganda bubble, in the state we were in when we didn't know about things like the Irgun or The Great March of Return.

It gets more hate because it is actually worse. They try to exploit the phone as much as possible even more so than the American social media spyware companies. There was a security researcher redditor post somewhere I forgot what it was, but they basically went over how much more shit tik tok was able to harvest.

I think the reason is less about "i, an individual, am getting my data harvested" (though certainly still a factor) byt more because China is still very much considered an enemy of the US, and they are not only harvesting americans data in a very invasive way - as in, recording pretty much everything you do on your phone, not just in the app - but an adversarial government now has access to all of that. Additionally, because the chinese "free market" has been effectively neutered in recent years, high chance that the CCP is able to influence TikTok's algorithm to affect what people see and push propaganda. People should be concerned about it in the same way people should be concerned about russian bot farm, but more so, because there isn't an audience of millions feeding russian bot farms their personal information.

Guess the issue is that us big bads are blocked in china. So while ccp can leverage social media to monitor western countries. Western goverments can not leverage western social media to do the same in china.

As an Australian I could not care wjaty the CCP knows about me, happy to send them as many butthole or dick pics photos as they want.

What concerns me is the invasiness of my own national government and its asshole FiveEyes conspirators. They can take my liberty. Those bastards I trust not one inch.