I think it's both. You don't think it's possible TikTok usage data is being accumulated for prominent Americans and/or their children for the purpose of intelligence gathering? I'd actually be surprised if it wasn't happening.
Can you really not imagine how a nation state could get valuable intelligence by having an intimate knowledge of how a large portion of another nation states population is thinking?
It's an election year. Intelligence can include things like your political affiliation and level of engagement, and can be (ab)used by targeting specific areas/demographics with supportive/decisive content. Think Theil's Palantir, but controlled by a foreign government.
Quite a lot! There are articles ad infinitum about how specifically tailored the TikTok algorithm is for many users.
I certainly think that knowing very specifically what a substantial portion of a county/market’s population is interested in qualifies as intelligence.
How effectively you make that information actionable is up to the creativity of your intelligence/advertising apparatus.
Name, age, location, politics, device, amount of time spent, interests, etc.
The easiest actionable thing would be propoganda of some sort, but there's a chance of a lot of smart people working on something that I can't imagine. I'm not saying this happening, but looking at Youtube and Meta, it's not hard to imagine.
