They were targeted for being Chinese. If they sold to a US company they could double the privacy invasive practices and you wouldn't hear a peep. It's not about privacy, none of your legislators give a fuck about that. In fact they use private companies to spy on you to get around that pesky constitution which says they need warrants or special legislative carve-outs but nothing about them buying your data from private companies who collect it anyways.

The US could easily have passed a nearly guaranteed to pass judicial review (unlike this) broad bill aimed at forcing better privacy practices for all social media that would either force better privacy for users or drive these companies out of business or out of the US market. But that would target Facebook which has been one of the primary lobbyists behind the anti-tik-tok scare campaign because it is murdering them in the young people market and ad dollars for retirees are not quite as good as for the younger crowd and any social media stuck with only the old is destined to whither to irrelevancy.

This is a hit job, make no mistake. By Facebook and by western investors who have been unable to invest in it and thus profit from it unlike western social media so it has to go.

If anything actions like this prevent more people from having an honest conversation and understanding of the privacy and other issues of modern social media. By putting all the blame on it being Chinese and not examining the psychology, the privacy invasiveness, etc of all of these social media apps they prevent an honest conversation, honest questioning and discussion.

Meta (Facebook/Instagram) and Google (Youtube) are some of the main proponents of this ban, alongside AIPAC and the bloodthirsty neocon establishment. So if you're thinking this is some sort of privacy win, think again, it couldn't be anything further from the truth.

I'm not against cracking down on socmed data collection. The issue is that US socmeds are worse in terms of privacy.

In the same way that Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Cisco, AT&T, Twitter, Reddit are owned by the US government, that is subject to regulations of the government for the country in which they are legally headquartered, in which most of their engineering work is carried out, in which their primary development and internet distribution infrastructure is and in which their CEOs and top staff are.

Or how about how the top micro-chip lithography company ASML despite being headquartered in the Netherlands had its sales of its products to China vetoed by US pressure under the guise of US national security and suppressing China. So much for the free market from the country that claims to be capitalist. So much for allowing freedom of operation by private enterprise. And not just ASML, they've banned an American company, NVIDIA from selling it's top AI chips to China as well, guess NVIDIA is an arm of the US government.

The US regularly applies pressure to companies.

That's not even getting into a whole plethora of other areas where the US exercises hard and soft power.

Wow, this must be the first time ever in your entire life that you've heard of a country blocking a takeover of a company.

Perhaps you should come out from under your rock more often lol.