Seems to me it’s only guilty of the same data scraping for marketing purposes that Meta is… maybe even less so as I always found TikToks advertising less gross than Instagrams.
Both suck but TikTok is slightly less suck.
Is it really a security thing or is it a “We are getting pressure from US companies to remove competition” thing?
No, it’s not about security.
The US government forced TikTok to use a US state friendly company to handle all its US data as well as have influence in US operations. That company was Oracle, the infamous InQTel (CIA) backed, Washington connected, defense contractor. They hosted, monitored, and managed all US TikTok data in a deal with the government & TikTok worth about $1bn.
This is entirely about two things:
Anti-competitiveness demands by other US social media companies (who also happen to be defense contractors / key parts of the US surveillance state).
The inability for the US government to directly censor content via the algorithm, certainly not without that being publicly known. This process escalated as the US struggled to contain its foreign policy narratives in '22 onwards and accelerated again immediately after Israel identified TikTok specifically as being a problem for their genocidal project in Gaza.