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TikTok does not in itself pose any significant danger to Western civilization. It's just a social media app. As is the case for Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc., the vast majority of the content it conveys is innocuous and unobjectionable (except perhaps on grounds that it is excessively pedestrian and trivial - but that only serves to reinforce the point of its essential harmlessness).
To the extent that TikTok conveys some amount of content that can be deemed as being "toxic mind poison and enemy propaganda" (however defined), this is no less true of other social media venues, and banning TikTok will do nothing to put a stop to the creation and dissemination of such material [1]. If TikTok is banned, then that stuff will simply migrate to those myriad other platforms. At worst, TikTok is just a symptom, not the source - and therein lies the problem ...
The particular reasons for which you and others think TikTok and only TikTok ought to be banned are not really germane to the point I am trying to make. I wasn't asking why you support banning TikTok. Given that you do support banning it (for whatever reasons), I was trying to get at how you can imagine it could even be possible to avoid the "mission creep" you disavow.
I don't doubt the sincerity of your disavowal - but I don't think it makes any sense, either. It is unavoidably belied and inescapably contradicted by the logic of your support for such a ban (regardless of whatever the reasons for that support might be). If it makes compelling sense to ban a particular "Chinese controlled" social media app (e.g., TikTok) because it spreads some amount of "toxic mind poison and enemy propaganda" (or because the Chinese are spying on their users, or because whatever), then how can it fail to be just as compellingly sensible to ban other social media apps that (do or could) serve exactly the same function, regardless of whether they are "controlled" (or even merely "influenced" or "guided") by the Chinese (or by the Russians, or the Israelis, or some native "homegrown" group or organization, or ... whomever)? How is it possible to justify the TikTok ban without also justifying all the "mission creep" to follow? Or conversely, if you reject the "mission creep", then what's the point of the TikTok ban? After all, the disseminators of the material you imagine you are forestalling will simply and safely find other "paths of least resistance" - paths for which you have already explicitly disavowed any attempts to ban.
IOW: How does banning TikTok not end up being either (1) useless, ineffective, and futile (for the purpose of preserving Western civilization/values/etc.), or (2) applied generally upon everyone (not just TikTok and its users) by politicians and bureaucrats according to whatever standards they arbitrarily please to adopt? How can either of these possibly redound to the net benefit of human liberty or Western civilization?
[1] I recently said the following in another thread:
But that cuts both ways. It applies every bit as much to attempts by would-be defenders of the West to control or eliminate what they consider to be "toxic mind poison and enemy propaganda" as it does to attempts by establishmentarians to control or eliminate what they consider to be "toxic mind poison and enemy ('domestic extremist' ?) propaganda". But it won't work for the former any better than for the latter. For better and for worse, the genie is out of the bottle, and it ain't goin' back - and liberty and Western values can only be damaged further by trying to make it.
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