I think they kind of do the active Internet part now. I don’t watch television and haven’t touched a TV for a long time, but recently I had to help a neighbour set his new smart TV up. It was one of the big brands, I don’t remember if it was LG, Samsung or something else. The TV couldn’t go through initial set up without me installing some app on his phone. If there was an option to skip I couldn’t see where it was, I only assume that if it was possible it was intentionally made un-intuitive or hard to discover. And of course, if you want the TV to connect to the app you must connect it to Internet. Again, it may have been a failure on my part, but I wouldn’t be supprised if they intentionally forced the user to do it this way.
Samsung had something similar on their cheaper phones (the A series) where during the initial set up it asks you to login or create a Samsung account and you have to jump through a couple of hoops to skip it, as well as some other part where I don’t remember what the phone asked you to do, but the “Yes” option was blue, while the button to skip was intentionally colored the same or very similar shade of gray as an inactive button. So if the TV was Samsung I don’t doubt for a second that they will do some shady practice like that.
Would Chinese TikTok allow anti-CCP content? I genuinely asking. If it does then yes, we can say it’s more democratic. If you mean that the “Chinese” TikTok allows anti-ICE and anti-MAGA/Trump content then this is just a foreign country that has nothing to loose from this, which is not necessarily “democratic”, it’s just that they probably have something to gain from it.