Montana has become the first state in the United States to ban TikTok entirely from its jurisdiction. The ban increasingly aggressive regulatory scrutiny that American politicians and regulators are having on the Chinese-owned social media platform.
TikTok has become one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, and US politicians have been concerned about it for quite some time. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company, and it’s being accused of collecting data from its American users and sharing it with the Chinese government. While all social media platforms collect data from the people who use them, TikTok is the largest Chinese one and had fast growth recently, which made it a prime target for politicians.
Montana Governor Greg Gianforte has recently signed a bill that forbids TikTok from operating in the state. The law will start to be effective on January 1, 2024. In the law’s explanation, the reason for the ban is that China is considered “an adversary of the United States,” therefore, it could have an interest in engaging in corporate and international espionage against residents of the state. Effectively, this law prohibits all store operators like Google and Apple from offering the app, and residents of the state from using it, setting a fine of $10,000 daily to any company that still keeps the app on its store in 2024.
While the law specified that both offering access and actually using TikTok is a crime, it’s still not 100% clear whether or how people using TikTok inside Montana will actually get any penalties. That could be easily done by using a virtual private network (VPN), which could overcome any state block, as TikTok will be still widely available in the rest of the United States.
The law can only be reversed if either it’s overturned by courts before the new year, or if TikTok’s operations are purchased by a country not deemed as a “foreign adversary” of the US. According to Reuters, TikTok claims that the law infringes the rights of the First Amendment of Montana citizens, and will fight the decision in court. This echoes TikTok’s previous response to the ban proposals, in which the company considered that this move could have a “considerable negative impact” on the free speech of many of its users. Still, it remains to be seen how far-reaching the ban will actually be, and whether other states may also try similar bills.
Source: Government of Montana, Reuters