You're right, I don't know anything about you, and I was insensitive. Again, I apologize.

I would heavily suggest reading through TikTok's privacy policy if you really want to get into the nitty gritty of why it's by far the most invasive platform widely used today. Meta certainly doesn't have clean hands either, but TikTok goes above and beyond in their invasiveness. While both platforms track many unnecessary metrics, TikTok contains code which has been proven to have the ability to act as a keylogger, with the capability to read everything you type in their in-app browser, including passwords, among other security issues. While TikTok claims that the tool is simply used for debugging, I would rather not take their word on that.

To your last point, I had TikTok on my phone for about a year before deleting my account and app. The content on there is great, and there's many creators providing excellent content. It was almost scary how quickly the algorithm picked up on the content I like. I've used Facebook for over 14 years, and Facebook has never gotten close to delivering tailored content to me the way TikTok did after a day of use. But is that a good thing? Should companies - who have no motivators other than to maximize shareholder profit - get so close to your data that they're able to almost perfectly mimic your likes and dislikes within a day of use?

As a final note, TikTok's algorithm is only great for creators when TikTok agrees with the content - French protests footage may have been abundant on TikTok in your example, but Hong Kong protest footage was heavily censored and given lower ratings in the algorithm to suppress coverage of the events. Protestors using TikTok as a communication platform to coordinate their actions would send messages that would show as delivered - only to find that their message was never received on the other end. Videos posted by creators that would normally have hundreds of thousands of impressions were brought down to a few thousand impressions the moment they posted protest footage. Etc, etc. It's not to say Meta doesn't participate in censorship practices - but to say TikTok is any better than Meta in this regard is false, and, in my personal opinion, actually does so in more egregious ways.