ABOUTOn Wednesday, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte signed a first-of-its-kind bill to ban Chinese social media app TikTok in the state. The law, due to take effect in January 2024, was quickly criticized for violating free speech laws.
In a statement, Gianforte’s office called the law an attempt to “protect the personal and private data of Montana residents from being collected by the Chinese Communist Party.” Tech and legal experts say the way the ban is implemented in the coming months could set a precedent for how TikTok, which has more than 150 million U.S. users, is regulated nationwide, especially as state and federal legislatures authorities seek to restrict access to the platform. achieve.
“Now we are seeing a patchwork of efforts to limit [app]Whether it’s restricting access to minors or banning downloads on government devices,” says Courtney Rudsch, a research fellow at the UCLA Institute of Technology, Law, and Policy.
Radsch notes that a complete ban in the state will lead to much more complications. “This will be a watershed moment because it will likely be challenged at the constitutional level.”
How will the ban work?
The new law appears to place the responsibility for regulating usage on app stores and TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, rather than on individual users. Platforms like Google and Apple will have to remove the app from their statewide app stores and could be fined $10,000 for every day they don’t comply. (Google and Apple did not respond to TIME’s request for comment.)
It’s currently unclear how the ban will apply beyond that, or how it will affect users who downloaded the app before January 1st, but experts say enforcing it will be a daunting task. Companies are trying to use a tactic called geofencing to block an app based on the user’s geographic boundaries, but users can easily use a VPN to change their location to a different state.
“It will be difficult to implement it in a way that cannot be bypassed,” says Ramya Krishnan, staff lawyer for the Knight First Amendment Institute.
Will the law survive in court? ?
Most likely, a lawsuit will be filed against the ban. Keegan Medrano, policy director for the ACLU of Montana, said in a May 17 interview. a statement that the Montana legislature “trampled” freedom of speech. “We will never trade our First Amendment rights for cheap political glasses.”
In a statement released on Twitter on Wednesday evening, TikTok said“We want to reassure Montana residents that they can continue to use TikTok to express themselves, earn money, and find community as we continue to work to protect the rights of our users inside and outside of Montana.” TikTok did not respond to TIME’s request for comments.
“[TikTok] it’s a place where a lot of people say different things. To make this information inaccessible to the people of Montana, and also to prevent Montans from participating in this discourse, the government will have to present very convincing arguments, ”says Anupam Chander, professor of law and technology at Georgetown University.
Any legal action could be very similar to the latest attempt to block TikTok. In 2020, the courts blocked Trump’s order to ban TikTok and the Chinese messaging app WeChat, ruling that the Trump administration failed to demonstrate enough security risk to restrict users’ freedom of speech.
Montana’s ban is based on the idea that the app poses a security risk, but experts say the state has no evidence to support this. “In order to justify the ban, Montana had to show that its privacy and security issues are real and that they cannot be addressed in narrower ways,” says Krishnan. “He didn’t.”
Krishnan adds that banning TikTok would set a dangerous precedent in how we regulate free speech online. “Restricting access to foreign media is something we usually associate with authoritarian regimes,” she says, “and we have to be very careful before giving such powers to our government.”
How does this fit into the broader TikTok ban trend?
Government officials in Montana are justifying the law as a way to combat data collection and misinformation on the platform, a stance that is becoming increasingly common. Congress recently introduced the RESTRICTION Act, which would allow the Secretary of Commerce to ban foreign technology and companies from operating in the US if they pose a threat to national security.
“The real issue here is the need for a national data protection law,” says Radsch, who says unregulated data collection is likely being done by tech companies both in the US and abroad.
The most effective solution would be to adopt legislation to regulate the collection and use of data. “Many things are national security risks of one level or another. We use the Internet all the time, where our day-to-day activities can be stolen by foreign players,” says Chander. “There is the issue of a national security threat, but it’s just important to remember that these risks are everywhere. It’s not just one application or one domain.”
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Write Simmon Shah: simmone.shah@time.com.
