First, the United States government isn't asking China to censor TikTok.
Second, the two proposed situations are entirely different. The former is censoring particular results, the latter is a content-neutral ban with the ability for ByteDance to continue operating with no change to content.
Third, perhaps this is controversial, but many people don't want a foreign adversary to have the ability to manipulate public perception. If you are the United States, allowing an enemy to have the ability to manipulate massive amounts of your population is extremely dangerous.
I don't even know that I support the ban, but I certainly know that most of these sorts of comparisons simply don't make sense and are either missing or ignoring vital pieces of the puzzle.
Completely different, it is not a content ban but a sanction against entire company Bytedance. Capcut was also removed, how is the video editing app influence public perception and steal US data?
China gave foreign internet applications a list of rules to comply. And these are doable rules, u may not want to do them, but they are doable. That is why Bing, iCloud, AWS, Microsoft office, Azure, Tesla's cars, some of hosts critical and sensitive Chinese data are operating fine in China, even used by governments and state-owned companies.
And Google and Meta are currently earning 10s of billions of dollars from Chinese advertisers. And google and Meta can offer any other services to China that is not regulated by online community services.
Chinese citizens can visit Google and Meta apps using VPN, Google and Meta can transact with Chinese companies. Chinese rules just target online community-based services with a list of doable rules.
Tiktok's original wish is to replicate China's rules for foreign online services in China in the US. So have US citizens do the data and code, implement whatever censorship regime US government wants, store US data on US servers. Allow US government official inside the company to review and oversee code, algorithm and data practices. Allow US government kill switch to turn off the app if they see anything. This is reciprocity of rules.
But US is not giving any technical, doable options for you to adhere to. It is giving two options: either we kill you, or we give you a knife so you can kill yourself. China gives foreign companies room to live, so your workers have jobs and income, your inventor keep their inventions and private assets. US gives the foreign company two options: either we kill you, or we give you a knife so you can kill yourself. Your workers are out of jobs, what was a comfortable livelihood gone, your inventor's invention is destroyed, you will not get what your invention is worth, your private assets are gone. Or we can take your invention away from you and you lose all control of your baby in the future. If you don't see the difference, I have no word for you.
China doesn't kill your companies. Take away the invention from the inventor, take away assets, IP, technology, branding from the inventor, forcing the inventor the giveaway the baby they invented and worked so hard on. China just don't want you say certain things within its borders, but everyone can live, have a job, get paid, bring food to the table. US just want to end your company, make everyone jobless, and you can't say what you want to say anyway because everything is gone.
Like anything else that needs cleaning.