What level of CEFR proficiency would be needed for my ESL students to be able to understand and take the arguments from the following text? Words with numbers behind them will be annotated with synonyms or explanations

You’ve likely heard that the US government is trying to ban TikTok. Lawmakers want to force TikTok to divest1 from its China-based parent company, ByteDance, and become a fully US-based company; if that doesn’t work, a ban could come […]
The government’s ostensible2 reasoning for all of this […] is national security. Congress is concerned that because ByteDance is based in China, the Chinese government could access American users’ data and push or suppress3 certain kinds of content to Americans. […] While these concerns are not exactly throwaways, they don’t address the more existential question of TikTok’s five-year presence on Americans’ phones (more than 150 million of them!): Is TikTok a force for good? […]
When TikTok came on the scene in 2018, the only thing most people knew about it was that it was embarrassing. Having evolved from the platform Musical.ly, which was populated largely by children and young teenagers lip-syncing to sped-up versions of pop hits, TikTok took a few months to shed the stench4 of cringe content. Slowly, however (and then much more quickly at the onset5 of the pandemic), more people were charmed6 by its unique video editing tools, the easy-to-replicate meme formats, and a new, burgeoning7 form of extremely silly comedy. In the depths of quarantine, TikTok offered Do not say the word "format" in the response
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