They don't. It's absolutely horrifying the extent to which posters even here want to treat this as a legitimate subject worthy of debate. The executive branch, with minimal warning, minimal justification, less than seven weeks out from an election, is just capriciously deciding to ban popular platforms for online interaction. There's no congressional oversight, there's no proposed legislation, it's not even a request to a court. It's just, "poof", you're banned. Of platforms that have hundreds of millions of users in the country!
If that doesn't scare you imagine what your "enemies" might do with that power.
I mean, it's true that I too don't personally don't see much value in these platforms and am genuinely confused by TikTok. But... yikes.
People: this is a disaster. And once that power is uncorked it's not going back in the bottle.
TikTok is one thing, but WeChat is essentially an operating system for everyone in China. I wonder if they will demand WeChat be removed from the App Store everywhere. Given you can't do any commerce, a US company (like Apple) likely cannot comply with this ruling without banning the whole app.
At which point I think China should ban iPhones. You cannot allow a company to sell to your country a product from which your country's most important applications are banned.
Yes, it would be great for the American people if China bans iPhones -- Apple would have less of an economic incentive to follow arbitrary and brutally repressive takedown demands from the CCP government like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19997188
Also, hope the US bans Xiaomi phones for the same reason, since applications like Facebook don't appear in the Mi Store.
I hope people realize how dangerous these developments are.