The clock is ticking for TikTok.
Governor Greg Gianforte made it official, TikTok is officially banned in Montana.
This comes on the heels of other states reigning the tech giant in. Utah recently issued some restrictions to the app. Now, those under 18 must get parental permission to register for an account, parents have full access and control over it, and the app is unusable for kids from 10:30pm to 6:30am.
But Montana is taking it one step further, banning the app altogether. The governor didn’t mince words.
“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.”
Montana previously banned TikTok from being downloaded and used on government devices.
And the state banned other key apps tied to hostile nations. WeChat, a Chinese one, and Telegram, based in Russia, are also on the chopping block.
The question is, how is this enforced? Do you put a phone block in?
The answer is fining the provider. $10,000 will be fined each time someone is able to actually download TikTok when in Montana. And it’ll be 10k a day if they find more than one instance of a download. This should incentivize TikTok to take off their app download ability within the state, which can probably done based off location pings and cell towers.
Of course, a VPN could just circumvent all of that. But the government says they’re using geofencing tech already successfully on online sports betting apps, so there’s an functional blueprint in place for this.
Civil liberties organizations are sounding the alarm saying it’s an infringement of constitutional rights. There’s one popular TikTok star in Montana who has 170,000 followers. He’s a football player for their flagship college there. He says he makes tens of thousands of dollars a month, so a potential lifeline would be cut off for him.
This may garner some momentum for a national TikTok ban. President Joe Biden flirted with the idea but ultimately shelved it, but he’s putting on the pressure to China. He has now indicated he’ll reignite efforts to ban the app if the Chinese owners of it don’t sell their shares.
TikTok is filled with largely inconsequential smut, but can we ban it? That’s a tough one with reasoned arguments on both sides.
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