Even though Tiktok isn’t a one-to-one equivalent of youtube, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a closer youtube equivalent come out of China, Russia, or even North Korea (the people are poor mainly because the country puts all its wealth in the military, and it already has extensive foreign espionage and media manipulation arms - if it wanted to, it could pour a lot into controlling a major video platform to get ahold off all that data).

In a more hopeful world, maybe a different small country might invest in it on a governmental level, similarly.

Saudi Arabia is already heavily investing in the gaming industry, in an attempt to diversify their economic reliance away from just their oil.

Qatar already has a lot invested in, and profit from, aljazeera (state-owned news) poking at all its neighbors’ human rights abuses, too.

Saudi Arabia - or another, unexpected country - could absolutely do the same with English-language social media, especially given the current lack of competition for youtube. Government funding could scale that barrier and snag a source of income and an espionage advantage for the host country.

Especially since Saudi Arabia, though rife with human rights abuses, is allied with the U.S. and thus less likely to become the target of a “ban tiktok specifically” push.

(sidenote: the “ban tiktok” bills would ban a lot more than tiktok, including VPNs - that subject’s a whole can of worms too).

Edit: especially now they’ve seen Tiktok as a template for this.