You have guessed right. The US government had a massive hand in the creation of modern social media, such as a significant amount of funding for Facebook during its startup phase. The intelligence agencies are mad that they can’t pull data from TikTok or influence its algorithms, on top of the American social media companies wanting to kill off their foreign competition as much as possible.

This bill has nothing to do with data privacy because if Congress cared about that they would’ve banned other platforms too. It’s about control and unfair competition.