Nobody seems to talk about the whale in the room which is the concept of short videos, aka digital crack cocaine and the ad business model, aka good old brain washing.
People worry about 'data exfiltration', but that is exactly what these products are - collect data about the users and sell it to advertisers.
Where the servers are located is of very little consequence in my opinion.
Yeah, I mind that 'my data' (whatever that might be) is stored on a communist hard drive and there's a brain washed data scientist running ideological queries through it.. The issue is not the ideology, but the fact that someone is running queries through my data collected while I'm using the digital drug to later manipulate me.