Hard for Oversea Chinese to access Douyin since you can't follow, like, or comment without a Chinese phone number, this change was rolled out a few years ago.
Douyin apparently "debunked" the Chinese media reports, they claim that foreigners still aren't able to register on Douyin even though many people have already seen the tiktok refugees on Douyin. I think Douyin was forced to deny publicly since Bytedance is still negotiating with US gov.
Also, I'm so curious how was Deino able to get his info from Weibo all these years?