A classic authoritarian tactic is to make people think that other governments are worse and that only giving away your freedoms and giving power to them is the way to fight it. TikTok became to risky for the government not because of China’s propaganda, but because China didn’t want to ban or deprioritize posts against genocide in Palestine funded by the US government. When any government feels treatened they censor the media and call it propaganda from another country. This is prime example that US is not better then China or Russia when it comes to it, only that so far it was their companies that were more popular, so they didn’t need to.