When the US does it it's just established practise. When a non-US entity does the same thing, it's suddenly a matter of national security.

Even as someone with a healthy distrust for the Chinese government, this really is the reason why. If Facebook was Chinese and nothing else changed, the US government would feel the same way.

TikTok is used as a surveillance tool in China but US social media is also used the same way here. I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook at the very least donated public profile pictures to the FBI for facial recognition purposes.

The US would react the same for almost any other government with exceptions to the Five Eyes, in which case they wouldn't care, and Russia, in which case it would be fully banned.

Not to claim that the US government and the Chinese government are the same, though. Only more or less from a spying and surveillance perspective.

When you see the amount of patriotism people seem to get flooded in from an early age, it's kinda understandable the blindness a lot of Americans have to how shitty their country has gotten.

On the flip side, China definitely has its own problems, particularly with such an authoritarian government currently.

Any country, US or not, spying on other countries' citizens ought to be taken as a matter of national security in the target countries. China does take it as a matter of national security, which is why, among other reasons, many foreign social media sites and services are blocked, run as separate instances from the rest of the world, or restricted heavily

On the other hand, if all of this public attention leads to restrictions on ALL digital tracking, not just from foreign corporations, I'll be soo happy.

Every accusation levelled at china is projection

The only issue I've ever had with TikTok is that it's the Chinese government spying on American citizens in a way they don't allow America to do to theirs. Not that either instance is right but you can't say something is wrong and not allowed and do it yourself.