The way I see this is that democracy is extremely susceptible to tools that can change public opinion en masse. This of course applies to Western social media as much as TikTok, and I'd love to see regulation around all social media algorithms to ensure they're unbiased. I see this as a good start to counter a real threat, which is China's ability to influence US elections through TikTok.
Regulation to ensure media is unbiased sounds on the face of it impossible. Anything that looks "unbiased" simply shares the same biases as you.
That said I think some regulatory control is needed. There needs to be some sort of accountability e.g. for intentional propagation of fake news or censorship or defamation. This is no different than requirements for ethical behavior in other industries. Just like we regulate public companies in general we should be able to impose some requirements on any business that distributes media. Free speech for individuals but if you are a business or a media "provider" you need to meet a somewhat higher bar? I think we used to rely on journalistic standards or self regulation but with "new" media (and maybe even with old media) this seems to be not working that well any more. There's a fine line there for sure but seems like whether China owns some social media or someone with US citizenship we still want to have guards against harms this can cause. The amount of power these companies wield is scary.