Generally, I would rather beat China, Russia, and Iran at the free speech game vs put up walls to free speech like what China's doing. Because that builds up resentment in your population and makes you less economically dynamic which kills innovation in other areas like AI.
It's not fun to be in China right now, the government doesn't care about your economic prosperity(yes just like the US somewhat with the low wages, and delayed interest rate cuts), and you have no way to express any creativity and yes you can vent about the government in non-group based and non-electronic means the leadership doesn't know what's wrong with the economy and social life. They are primed for a rebellion. No wonder anyone who can leave is leaving for Anglo/English-speaking countries.
China is increasing military spending at the cost of innovation and the economy which will only leave them behind in the future and later they won't have either.
We should not copy them. I get it the US spent too much on nation-building which should have gone into future goods(like investments in R&D and infrastructure), and peer-to-peer military spending(I still won't forget the 44th president(Obama), axing the F-22 and a whole host of innovative weapons programs), and the remainder could have went to paying off debt, current spendings like Social security, Medicaid, and medicare alongside education.
But to mirror China in banning TikTok, and likely Chinese & Russian internet products, software, etc will be counterproductive. Why can't we pay people in our own country in college to build AI tools to spam them back? Why can't we build a regulatory environment where un-productive and large current companies(Meta for example) can't just buy off an innovative startup, by the way, Facebook killed off Vine which would have been a better version of Tik Tok.
