[Aunche]

Maybe it seems identical because China doesn't have any grand short term ambitions, but financial incentive is fundamentally very different. Meta may screw over the American people, but America losing it's superpower status would only hurt them.

[estearum]

I can't parse your first sentence or what the relevance is to the discussion.

You said X has no incentive to allow foreign influence ops. Very clearly, not only do they have an incentive to allow them, but they have an additional disincentive to disallowing them (cost).

The fact those aligned incentives originate from different ultimate goals is totally irrelevant for as long as the two are aligned.

[Aunche]

Foreign ops makes up a fraction of percent of X's revenue, if that. Any profit they gained from it cancels out with a similar degree of negative attention from the government, so overall they're incentivized to follow the direction of three letter agencies. A less inflammatory algorithm would maybe cost X a couple percent in revenue. If the government really wants to, they could pressure X to change their algorithm as they can easily cause much more pain to X than a couple percent of revenue.

A Chinese owned TikTok simply doesn't follow the same calculus. If the CEO of Bytedance (note different from the CEO of TikTok) gets a order flood the platform with anti-Taiwanese propaganda right before China invades Taiwan, the CEO would have to follow through even if it causes the value of TikTok to zero. The ban was not about how much harm TikTok has done already, it's about how much harm they can do in a worst case scenario.