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Sounds to me like they don't want to ban it, they want it sold to American business at a massively discounted rate. Standard mafia shit.
I did hear a solid counter point recently.
All American social media is banned in China. Effectively, if we don't do something like this, the Chinese social media becomes the biggest (because they restrict ours but we wouldn't restrict theirs).
Mafia shit or international power politics shit.
The danger here is they could do this to Facebook or Instagram in other countries (eg India)and use this as a precedent. I'm not sure India wants to pick that fight with the US, but this is all a weird game that's being played.
But yes, on the surface, and the immediate impact, this seems like such a fucking dumb tone deaf thing that our legislature pushed through without most Americans wanting this.
Its hardly the same thing though, China never forced a social media company to sell up to stay based in China, there was no discussion it was just blocked. China has always been very insular, whilst that's not a good thing its at least consistent.
What the US is doing here is consistent that its "anti-China" but they have never tried to influence a company in this way, this is unprecedented, making a bill to intimidate and shut down a company is kind of insane.
If they had happened to write a good privacy law that happened to prevent most of Tik Tok's abuses, I'd have way less of a problem with it because then US companies who do the same shit would have to follow the same rules. But instead we let Zuckerberg and Musk do the exact same shit without repercussions.
But we have a government that's basically carriage with a steam engine bolted on plus a V8 and also rockets and the thing is broken beyond repair and we just have to wait until most people realize that to get out because they didn't install emergency exits.
That's a fair point, it is a game as much as it is a racket.