Montana Becomes First State to Ban TikTok Outright

Montana became the first U.S. state to ban TikTok Wednesday after Governor Greg Gianforte (R.) signed an April bill into law.

With lawmakers on both sides of the aisle increasingly concerned that the platform poses national-security risks, TikTok has been banned from the devices of many governmental employees both at the federal and state level. Montana’s ban — which prevents TikTok from operating within its jurisdiction entirely — is the most extensive in the United States.

Senate Bill 419 will become effective on January 1, 2024, and builds upon a December 2022 ban of the platform on state equipment. Entities that violate the law are to be punished in the amount of $10,000 for each discrete violation and liable for an additional $10,000 each day thereafter that the violation continues.

TikTok itself and mobile-app stores, like those operated by Apple and Google, could be subject to these fines if the app’s availability is not curtailed. A trade group associated with Apple and Google recently said it is impossible for the companies to prevent access to TikTok in a single state, the New York Times reported.

“The Chinese Communist Party using TikTok to spy on Americans, violate their privacy, and collect their personal, private, and sensitive information is well-documented,” explained Gianforte in a statement. “Today, Montana takes the most decisive action of any state to protect Montanans’ private data and sensitive personal information from being harvested by the Chinese Communist Party.”

TikTok has become a flashpoint in increasing tensions between the U.S. and China. CEO Shou Zi Chew appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in March to answer the questions of lawmakers. In the face of a nationwide ban, Chew has proposed a $1.5 billion plan nicknamed Project Texas, which would purportedly have the company wall off U.S. operations, with all data being stored here. U.S. company Oracle would have the ability to access TikTok’s algorithms in order to flag issues for government inspectors.

Lawmakers viewed the plan with a great deal of skepticism during the hearing. The committee’s ranking member, Representative Frank Pallone Jr. (D., N.J.), said he thinks “the Beijing Communist government will still control and have the ability to influence what you do.”

A former executive of ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company headquartered in China, recently made a series of stunning allegations about the platform in an employment lawsuit he filed. According to Yintao Yu, ByteDance’s Beijing office had a unit of Communist Party members known as “the Committee” that “guided how the company advanced core Communist values” and possessed the ability to turn off its Chinese apps entirely.

“The Committee maintained supreme access to all the company data, even data stored in the United States,” read the complaint.

Yu claimed in his lawsuit that the geographic location of the servers is unimportant because engineers would still have “backdoor” access to user data. He also claimed the platform is a “useful propaganda tool” and that ByteDance engineers have openly promoted anti-Japanese sentiments and demoted support for pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong on the platform.

TikTok has previously faced total bans. India, then one of the app’s biggest markets, banned the social media platform in mid-2020, with the government claiming the data of users were secretly being transmitted outside the country.

TikTok has opposed the Montana ban’s passage in the months preceding Gianforte’s signature, but those efforts have proved unsuccessful.

The Montana law is expected to draw a legal challenge on First Amendment grounds. The ACLU condemned the law on Wednesday, saying it “tramples on our free speech rights under the guise of national security and lays the groundwork for excessive government control over the internet.”