What reasons would a foreign government want information about foreign citizens of its adversary?

At the end of the day you are the outgroup when it comes to the CCP and it'd be best to remember that.

If you are an American, the intelligence community already treats you like you are the outgroup.

Which is another problem entirely but it's whataboutism. It says nothing about the CCPs motivations.

As of yesterday, powerful people in China had a lot of power over you. As of today, they have a lot less. That's a good thing.

It's endlessly amusing that people are willing to speak positively of an authoritarian state, not even for a paycheck which one might not forgive but at least understand, but merely for their daily dose of brainrot[0] videos.

[0] In the dictionary sense of the word: https://corp.oup.com/news/brain-rot-named-oxford-word-of-the...

>Who is more likely to lobby my government to adverse affect?

Dude, the concern is that allowing TikTok is quite literally allowing the CCP to indirectly lobby. It's how this whole thing got started in earnest.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/business/tiktok-phone-cal...

The geopolitical utility of the app is to give the CCP more power to manipulate and hurt you. They want to get closer to the level of power that domestic US powers-that-be have. I'm blown away that this seems to lost on so many people commenting here

Maybe my interests and those of the general American public are more in line with the "CCP" than Israel regarding international affairs.

Putting CCP in quotes is silly. It is not a conspiracy theory that the CCP exerts an extreme level of control over ByteDance.

Your interests are probably not aligned with the CCP. The American public's certainly aren't. The Chinese government wants to achieve a hegemony and export their economy and culture by undermining the US wherever they can. We don't fit into that in a way that won't result in a markedly worse life for us.

TikTok would boost content about how Israelis making target practice out of Palestinian children is great and needs to happen more often if it made the US look bad. That you can't see that, or can't separate that instance from other possibilities, is exactly why TikTok is under scrutiny.

It's in quotes because the actual English initialism is CPC.

Using "CCP" shows your ideological bias.

You say that like CPC doesn't carry an ideological implication of its own. To the average person, the distinction between calling it the Chinese Communist Party and the Communist Party of China is so miniscule that they're not going to seriously engage with you if you earnestly try and take that angle. Go ahead and nitpick over how people refer to the party at your ideology's expense. I sure as shit won't stop you.

It shows that you make no effort to get non-US media and don't have informed opinions.

I make plenty of effort to stay informed, I just don't make any effort to argue inconsequential shit to signal that I'm "more informed". At some point in this conversation, you just quit addressing anything other than what you believe to be the most accurate initialism for the Party like anybody cares. You're either deflecting or are arguing silly points for the love of the game. If you genuinely believe what you're implying you do, you're actively repelling people from your ideology.