As expected, TikTok sued Montana’s decision to ban the app in the state.
last wednesday, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte signs bill banning TikTok from operating in state to protect residents from China-led intelligence operations. At the time, TikTok promised to fight for its users in the region, and today it announces the next step:
We are challenging Montana’s unconstitutional TikTok ban to protect our company and hundreds of thousands of TikTok Montana users. We believe our legal challenge will prevail based on an extremely strong set of precedents and facts.
— TikTokComms (@TikTokComms) May 22, 2023
TikTok says Montana’s ruling violates the First Amendment and will seek to stop the bill from taking effect in January 2024.
This is the first proposed outright ban on the app in the United States, following various security concerns raised by cybersecurity experts, including top spy agencies in various regions. As China still escalating tensions with neighboring regionsAND threaten to challenge the US on various fronts, it is believed that the CCP could indeed use TikTok as a carrier of intelligence – something parent company ByteDance already has with at least one American journalist.
Last year in December Financial Times it was reported that Four employees of ByteDance’s internal audit team accessed the IP addresses and other personal information of FT journalist Cristina Criddle to find out how she obtains internal information about the company. By comparing its location with that of ByteDance staff, the group sought to identify who might be leaking information to the press.
This is just one example of how TikTok data could potentially be used to track and track US citizens, which is why security experts have been sounding the alarm on the app for two years.
As such, Montana’s new ban could become the first of many – which is why TikTok needs to embrace it right away and question the legality of its approach.
But whatever the outcome, it still may not save TikTok in the US – with reports also indicating that TikTok’s US data integration and separation plans are not as advanced as TikTok suggested.
TikTok says it has spent billions building new, separate data centers in the US in partnership with Oracle – but according to a new company report informationOracle is not in regular contact with TikTok regarding the progress of the initiative.
This is unlikely to be viewed positively by White House officials, who are still considering a potential TikTok ban. As such, even if he can stop Montana’s new law, he may not be able to stay in the US in the long run.
There is still a long way to go on this and six months before any ban goes into effect. But as we have for over 18 months, we await CFIUS’s full recommendations and how the White House views TikTok, which will then dictate the way forward for the platform.