Montana’s first-in-the-nation law banning the video-sharing app TikTok in the state was blocked Thursday, one month before it was set to take effect, by a federal judge who called the measure unconstitutional.
The ruling delivered a temporary win for the social media company that has argued Montana’s Republican-controlled Legislature went “completely overboard” in trying to regulate the app. A final ruling will come at a later date after the legal challenge moves through the courts.
U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy said the ban “oversteps state power and infringes on the Constitutional right of users and businesses” while singling out the state for its fixation on purported Chinese influence.
“Despite the state’s attempt to defend (the law) as a consumer protection bill, the current record leaves little doubt that Montana’s legislature and Attorney General were more interested in targeting China’s ostensible role in TikTok than with protecting Montana consumers,” Molloy wrote Thursday in granting the preliminary injunction. “This is especially apparent in that the same legislature enacted an entirely separate law that purports to broadly protect consumers’ digital data and privacy.”
Montana lawmakers in May made the state the first in the U.S. to pass a complete ban on the app based on the argument that the Chinese government could gain access to user information from TikTok, whose parent company, ByteDance, is based in Beijing.
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More than half of U.S. states and the federal government have banned TikTok on official devices. The company has called the bans “political theatre” and says further restrictions are unnecessary due to the efforts it is taking to protect U.S. data by storing it on Oracle servers. The company has said it has not received any requests for U.S. user data from the Chinese government and would not provide any if it were asked.
“The extent to which China controls TikTok, and has access to its users’ data, forms the heart of this controversy,” the judge wrote.
Attorneys for TikTok and the content creators argued on Oct. 12 that the state had gone too far in trying to regulate TikTok and is essentially trying to implement its own foreign policy over unproven concerns that TikTok might share user data with the Chinese government.
TikTok has said in court filings that Montana could have limited the kinds of data TikTok could collect from its users rather than enacting a complete ban. Meanwhile, the content creators said the ban violates free speech rights and could cause economic harm for their businesses.
Christian Corrigan, the state’s solicitor general, argued Montana’s law was less a statement of foreign policy and instead addresses “serious, widespread concerns about data privacy.”
The state hasn’t offered any evidence of TikTok’s “allegedly harmful data practices,” Molloy wrote.
Molloy noted during the hearing that TikTok users consent to the company’s data collection policies and that Knudsen — whose office drafted the legislation — could air public service announcements warning people about the data TikTok collects.
The American Civil Liberties Union, its Montana chapter and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy rights advocacy group, have submitted an amicus brief in support of the challenge. Meanwhile, 18 attorneys generals from mostly Republican-led states are backing Montana and asking the judge to let the law be implemented. Even if that happens, cybersecurity experts have said it could be challenging to enforce.
See here for the background. This is relevant because of the lawsuit filed by UT professors over the ban on TikTok on the WiFi networks of multiple public universities, which were enacted after the Greg Abbott executive order banning TikTok from state-owned devices. The executive order is surely lawful, the WiFi ban is much more controversial and quite arguably an overreach. The particulars of the Texas lawsuit, for which there has been a hearing but no ruling yet, are different but the underlying question is the same. And I expect this is another case that will eventually make its way to SCOTUS.
State governments need to stay out of the app banning laws. However, social media is doing great harm to children and adults. More parents need to demand limits for children to these apps.
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