It’s happening! The GOP-controlled
Montana
House of Representatives voted on Friday in favor of
SB 419
, titled “Ban
TikTok
in Montana.”
The bill now heads to Gov. Greg Gianforte’s (R-MT) desk and, if it becomes law, will make it illegal to download TikTok in the state from January 2024 onward, with penalties of up to $10,000 per day for any companies — including
Apple
, Google, and TikTok itself — that make the app available.
MONTANA LAWMAKERS PASS STATEWIDE BAN ON TIKTOK, FIRST IN NATION
If Gianforte does sign this bill into law — he has already banned the social media platform on state government devices — it’s likely to hit almost immediate opposition from those who desperately want to provide the Chinese Communist Party with access to Montanans, particularly young Montanans, ironically under the guise of protecting the American freedoms despised by the CCP.
“We will continue to fight for TikTok users and creators in Montana whose livelihoods and First Amendment rights are threatened by this egregious government overreach,” said Brooke Oberwetter, a TikTok spokeswoman,
according
to NPR.
The argument that such a ban would amount to a violation of the First Amendment is also being
pushed
by a collection of “free speech and civil liberties organizations,” including the American Civil Liberties Union.
“This legislation would violate the First Amendment rights of hundreds of thousands of Montanans who use TikTok to communicate, receive information, and express themselves daily,” the groups wrote in a joint letter to the Montana House of Representatives earlier this month, before arguing this legislation would “flout the First Amendment and would trample on Montanans’ constitutional right to freedom of speech” and that there is “no public evidence” of “serious, immediate harm to national security.”
This viewpoint is both naive and dangerous.
The immediate national security risk posed by TikTok is clear when we consider that Chinese corporations — including TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, headquartered in Beijing — are legally compelled to cooperate with the CCP regarding intelligence operations. Let alone the fact that TikTok has
admitted
that some staff in China can access the data of international users.
As China uses giant balloons, the least subtle espionage equipment in history, to spy on Americans from the sky, why wouldn’t it be bold enough to do the same when it has a handheld window into the lives of millions of Americans?
Moreover, the free speech argument starts to fall apart when we consider the obvious fact that American citizens have a wide range of options when it comes to “expressing themselves” on social media.
If TikTok were the only option available to Americans, that would be one thing. But in reality, they have a wide array of choices that aren’t controlled by our greatest global adversary.
Without TikTok, Americans can still use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, Reddit, or even LinkedIn, all of which are based in the United States and are run by entities infinitely less likely to, say, release deadly pandemics upon the world, bring the world’s supply chain to a shuddering halt, or invade American allies and destroy our nation’s access to semiconductors overnight.
Montana is right to protect its citizens from TikTok. It’s time other states do the same.
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Ian Haworth (
@ighaworth
) is the host of
Off Limits with Ian Haworth
.
