There has been no official announcement that such a change is coming, but Reddit commenters speculated that possibly the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was requiring a change to stop American TikTokers from using the app to influence Chinese citizens.

Ah, that trustworthy and unbiased group of China experts that are Redditors

Two sentences before this they were explaining quite clearly why chinese users might actually be bothered by the flood of american users and why they might want the ability to filter by IP region, but because some redditors speculated that the SeeSeePee doesn’t want the Americans to spread their freedom-loving germs to their country then that must be why they’d do it, if that rumor were to be proven true