It's also documented that Cambridge Analytica used data made available to it by Facebook to target millions with political propaganda. It wasn't just the US election, they had plenty of practice validating the strategy in elections in smaller countries.
Where's the evidence that TT has been successfully used for nefarious purposes on a similar scale?
Think about how last summer Harvard discovered that Covid started in Wuhan back in August 2019 using satellite imagery and then overnight the focus became how to combat anti-Chinese sentiment (hate crimes had risen against Asian-Americans to levels seen earlier in the 2010s, still an order of magnitude less prevalent than hate crimes against American Blacks). TikTok was the principle platform leading that charge. Pretty simple strategy and it worked, no one even talks about the timing of the Wuhan cover up anymore.
From where I'm sitting, the overnight focus was on establishing public health protocols to prevent the healthcare system from a black-swan type of event-driven collapse.
And passing legislation to provide financial relief.
Those four things are absolutely what the discourse morphed into, but it goes to show the success of the campaign. Because Trump called it the "kung flu" and is almost always racist with his rhetoric, liberals piled onto anyone that tried to dig into the origin of covid as being racially motivated. TikTok made that culture war really simple for liberals to fight. Trump is a nasty guy full of bad ideas, but the culture war and Trump Derangement Syndrome are real things that shut down legitimate inquiry.
The concern is exactly that such evidence might be much harder to find for TikTok. Cambridge Analytica's clients included multiple prominent American politicians, including the sitting president at the time the scandal broke. China would try their hardest to stop a scandal involving Xi Jinping from breaking in the first place, and certainly the People's Congress wouldn't demand a public investigation as the US Congress did.
Where's the evidence that TT has been successfully used for nefarious purposes on a similar scale?