> but a culturally dominant app being leveraged by an authoritarian state goes in the not good colunm.

I think political scholars will debate on what the net effect of this is actually going to be. As in, are we better off with the GOP or the CCP controlling the algorithm? Certainly, the CCP has anti west incentives that the GOP does not, like trying to confuse us as to how we should feel about protecting Taiwan.

But in the past, the CCP has been interested in sewing discontent in the US and the method by which they have done that is by propping up the GOP. And many ways by which both the CCP and GOP would presumably manipulate the algorithm would be similar—owning libs, promoting radical right wing views, etc. But having the GOP control TikTok is a different thing entirely, they are much more incentivized to propagate their own flavor of politics to skew the nations narrative to their liking, in a much more controlled way than I think the CCP would. See twitter for prior art here.

At least if TikTok is owned in the US there might be some oversight into what’s going on. As bankrupt as Mark is as a person it doesn’t seem like hes pushing his own political views into instagrams algorithm, unlike the case at twitter. I think we have yet to see how Ellison will treat the great power of controlling the TikTok algorithm but I’m cynical.