There was literally a Senate hearing today about KOSA, the bill allowing the US government the legal grounds to control sources of information on the internet. So no, they aren't totally different things.
And I was specifically referring to this part that OP said:
I heard that the Chinese Communist Party was collecting some worrying amount of information on their user base
The only difference between the Chinese government and the US government collecting information is that the US goes through a middleman who aggregates it from multiple sources.
Meta/Twitter/YouTube have everything to do with this because they're doing the exact same thing. Do I need to mention the numerous times Facebook has been sued for illegal data collection? Cambridge Analytica ring a bell?