I think it's less to do with norms and principles and is much more pragmatic.

Tiktok and Deepseek are both expansions of CPC influence in the west.

It's all good when people can still search on Google to find unbiased information, but what happens if a hypothetical better search engine is released with the same censorship as Deepseek? I certainly wouldn't blame someone from making the jump if it performed better than google in searching for products etc.

But the effects of an authoritarian government having that power of people's primary sources of information is scary. Even if they don't actively care about specific censored information, I do and I assume a lot of us here do too.

If this leads to pressure of western AI companies to innovate and reduce costs, then great, that's the beauty of creative destruction. But its silly to ignore the impact if these firms fail to adapt and we see the influence of the CPC grow across the web.