I think there’s a pretty strong argument that a pro-corporate tilt doesn’t result in a difference in content promotion regarding Tibet, Tiananmen Square, Hong Kong, and/or Uyghur.

You could argue the US military industrial complex might push South China Sea, pro-Taiwan, pro-Ukraine, and pro-Isreal content; that seems distant enough from (e.g.) Facebook, but I’m not sure how we’d tell. We don’t have a major social media platform in a place like (e.g.) Switzerland to study (granted, the way Proton is expanding they might try).

In any case, I do think it’s pretty damning for TikTok’s claims of independence that China’s direct conflicts, Tiananmen Square and Hong Kong are basically suppressed to the point of being nil (EDIT: Tibet is also a direct conflict of sorts but isn’t talked about as much from what I’ve seen on “western social media” and could be conditionally filtered … there’s still probably a fair bit of “Tibet” content that exists outside of the “bad for the CCP” space).

We also need to take into account how addressable the problems are in the current climate. To tackle pro-corporate biases, we’re looking at a long quest that runs counter to the underlying fabric of our society. It’s a fundamentally anti-capitalist proposition and we live in a capitalist society.

This issue with a foreign power is much smaller, and thus easier to crack. It’s much less far-reaching, it’s less important. But it should still lead to small gains in the improvement of the information sphere.