[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.

[estearum]

Uhhh... you seem to imply that TikTok and X operate under different rules, while actually making the argument that they're the same ("if the govt really wanted to, they could successfully pressure X contrary to X's economic incentives")

Beyond that, you're just asserting a bunch of assumptions as if they're fact.

And all of this is irrelevant. I never argued TikTok/X/Meta are the same. The issue I raised is you positioning 2016 enforcement action as evidence of X's current enforcement posture and then suggesting there is some compliance motivation here (there isn't – there's no relevant law to comply with as far as USG is concerned) and suggesting there's no incentive to allow foreign ops (there is, as demonstrated).