That’s not a silly argument if your argument is about national security. For the exact same reason, China blocks almost all western apps. It gives a potential route for whatever nation is considered hostile to influence your population, and TikTok has actually activated this influence at least once directly. They tried to activate their users to protest congress from passing laws restricting them.
Basically, they have the ability to influence users, and they also have the will to do so as they’ve already shown. In what world eould they not be a national security threat? It’s also really hard for me to accept this argument from a Chinese company when China has the great firewall to “protect” it’d citizens from outside influence.
You can argue that it is not to benefit the citizens and rather just the state, which is fair. You can’t reasonably argue that the state has nothing to fear.
This is the idea, but it isn’t a good idea. Police are given so many jobs, but are only really trained and capable of a few. We should be taking tasks off the plate of police (which they would agree they have too many) and giving them to other groups. This should mean moving funding from police to other response units, otherwise referred to as “defunding the police,” but that sounds bad so I guess we can’t do that.