The article hypothesizes a network of bot accounts that spam targets across social media with invective. So its got nothing to do with TikTok (a company run out of Hong Kong and Singapore, with an American subnet that's physically cut off from its Chinese-mainland counterpart). Even then, if you look at the actual details of the article...

When trolls disrupted an anti-communism Zoom event organized by New York-based activist Chen Pokong in January 2021, he had little doubt who was responsible. The trolls mocked participants and threatened that one victim would “die miserably.” Their conduct reminded Chen of repression by the government of China, where he spent nearly five years in prison for pro-democracy work.

He's a major contributor to US propaganda networks across the South Pacific who attracted a bunch of harassing call-ins during a Zoom meeting. He then attempted to tie the calls back to a wave of FBI arrests of Chinese residents, accused of subversive activities aimed at American institutions.

There's a certain irony in this story, because Chen Pokong himself spent two years in prison for championing anti-CCP protests in Guangzhou, following the Tienanmen protests in '89. So a guy who was once a passionate advocate for dissident expression and protest as an economics professor at Sun Yat-sen University is now a professor at Columbia University participating in mass arrests and imprisonments of US residents for dissident expression and protest.