The GOP-majority legislature in Montana voted Friday to ban TikTok, a popular Chinese-owned video-sharing platform, sending the bill to Gov. Greg Gianforte's desk.
Montana's legislature gave the bill final approval after the Montana House voted 54 to 43 in favor. If the bill is signed, Montana will become the first U.S. state to impose a complete ban on the platform.
The legislation prohibits downloads of TikTok in Montana and would fine any "entity" such as an app store $10,000 a day for each time someone is given access to the app. Users don't face any penalties. If signed, the law wouldn't take effect until January 2024, unless Congress passes a national law overriding it, or if TikTok cuts its ties with China.
A representative from the tech trade group TechNet told state lawmakers that app stores don't have the ability to geofence apps on a state-by-state basis, so the Apple App Store and Google Play Store would not be able to adhere to the law if it takes effect.
Ashley Sutton, TechNet’s executive director for Washington state and the northwest, said Thursday that the “responsibility should be on an app to determine where it can operate, not an app store.”
But Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen has said that apps for online gambling can be disabled in states that do not allow it, so the same should be possible for TikTok.
TikTok Threatens Lawsuit
Nearly half of U.S. states, Montana included, as well as the U.S. federal government, already prohibit TikTok on government-owned devices and/or networks.TikTok is owned and operated by ByteDance, a Chinese company based in Beijing, but moved its headquarters to Singapore in 2020.
TikTok "harvests expansive amounts of data from its users' devices, much of which is unrelated to the app's purported objective of video sharing, and offers this information to the Chinese Communist Party," Gianforte wrote in a December 2022 memo to some state officials.
The governor declined to say Friday whether he plans to sign the bill into law. Gianforte “will carefully consider” all bills the Legislature sends to his desk, reads a statement via spokesperson Brooke Metrione.
TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter said a legal challenge over the measure's constitutionality would follow if the bill is passed, calling the legislation an "attempt to censor American voices.”
National Security Concerns
The FBI and Federal Communications Commission last year issued warnings of possible threats TikTok poses to U.S. national security, including that user data obtained by the app—such as browsing history and location—could be shared with the authoritarian Chinese regime. Concerns were heightened in late 2022 amid media reports that staff of ByteDance used the company’s access to TikTok user data to improperly track American journalists.While TikTok has previously said that all U.S. user data is stored within the United States, it has also since admitted that this was not true. In a September 2022 congressional hearing, TikTok executives refused to commit to stopping the flow of American data to China.