Montana is the first state in the country to ban the use of the platform. The law will come into force next year, amid debate over the impact and safety of the popular video-sharing app curtos owned by Chinese company ByteDance.
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“You would have to build the Great Wall of Montana,” said Tarah Wheeler, director of the cybersecurity company Red Queen Dynamics and senior researcher for Global Cyber Policy at the American think tank Council on Foreign Relations, in reference to the historic Great Wall of China .
“You cannot maintain a ban in the state and remain free from the kind of surveillance you are trying to escape,” he added.
The move will serve as a legal test for a nationwide ban on the platform, something lawmakers in Washington have increasingly called for.
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Five TikTok content creators in the state have already filed suit in federal court, arguing that the ban is illegal and violates their free speech rights.
Difficult to comply
Several American politicians accuse the application of being under the supervision of the Chinese government and of being a spying tool for Beijing. TikTok unequivocally denies this accusation. And, in this context, it faces an ultimatum from the White House to separate from its Chinese owners, or stop operating in the United States.
According to the law signed into law on Wednesday (17) by Governor Greg Gianforte, a violation occurs every time “a user accesses TikTok, is offered the possibility of accessing TikTok or downloading TikTok”.
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In the opinion of Cyber Threat Alliance director Michael Daniel, Montana could not enforce this ban “without doing a lot of other things that we don't want governments at any level in the United States to be able to do.”
Young TikTok fans are likely to take advantage of free software to get a virtual private network (VPN) through which people change their device locations.
Additionally, it's possible for tech-savvy Montana teens to use the VPN to be seen logging in from other states, Wheeler explained, which also presents vulnerabilities for spyware, or malware lurking on some VPN networks.
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Teenagers being teenagers
While the ban was passed under the rationale of protecting TikTok users in Montana from alleged Chinese meddling, there has been no clear evidence of it, said Jason Kelley, acting director of the internet rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation.
It is the lack of a national data privacy law in the United States that leaves users vulnerable, with free reign to compile and sell internet users' information, he added.
“If China wants user data, they can just go buy it,” Kelley told AFP.
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The bill behind the ban mentioned TikTok pranks dubbed “challenges.” A Montana lawmaker expressed regret that his son had attended one.
“Reading between the lines, I think these lawmakers are angry because they don’t understand the culture of TikTok and how young people use” the app, Kelley added.
“Montana lawmakers wanted to do anything to counterbalance the negative impact of teenagers being teenagers and also the influence of TikTok to do stupid things,” he opined.
The ban will take effect in 2024, but will be lifted if TikTok is acquired by a company incorporated in a country not considered by the United States to pose a foreign threat, the text of the law says.
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