Montana Governor Signs Bill Banning TikTok: “The CCP Is Spying on Americans”

Tsing

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The State of Montana has announced that governor Greg Gianforte has signed Senate Bill 419, a piece of legislation that would make Montana the first state in the nation to ban Tiktok and prohibit app stores from offering the app within the state. The new law comes a few months after Gianforte prohibited the use of TikTok on state equipment and for state business in Montana, and while protecting Montanans’ personal, private, and sensitive data and information from intelligence gathering by the Chinese Communist Party has been given as one reason as to why the bill was signed, the new rules may also help curb some of the weirder trends that TikTok has prompted as of late among state residents, including the Kia Challenge and NyQuil Challenge. ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, offers a number of other apps that include Lemon8 and CapCut, a video editor.

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This should make for interesting courtroom drama
 
I'm no fan of it and quite honestly loathe it for all the challenge-related deaths, which I could easily be very callous about, but honestly getting rid of it just means it will be replaced by something else.
 
Yeah I despise it and don't ever use it, but on the flip side I don't think there is any case for a government to outright ban it from citizens.
 
I agree that there is a real national security risks involved in the types of data vacuuming China can do with the TikTok app, especially since they have a long history of blackmailing people into doing industrial and other espionage on their behalf.

It is also a concerning prospect to have it amplify western and democracy critical opinions over those in favor of democracy.

The question is can you constitutionally ban an app like this, or is it "speech". And I guess that depends. There is nothing preventing a user from posting the same content on a different, non-chinese platform, so one could argue that their speech is not being limited, but what do I know. I am decidedly not a lawyer.

I do suspect that this will be yet another legal case that comes down to just how liberally we chose to interpret the founders definitions of what constitutes speech. I mean, if money is speech, what isn't speech?
 
I start by saying that I don't use tiktok, don't like its trends, but I'm not in favor of government micromanaging what app you can install. It is a slippery slope. Like banning VPNs "for your protection".
I agree that there is a real national security risks involved in the types of data vacuuming China can do with the TikTok app, especially since they have a long history of blackmailing people into doing industrial and other espionage on their behalf.
If someone has skeletons in their closet they will find a way to exploit it. Tiktok is just a good scapegoat, espionage existed before tiktok. In fact I don't think I heard about any case where tiktok was specifically implicated in high profile espionage.
It is also a concerning prospect to have it amplify western and democracy critical opinions over those in favor of democracy.
What difference does it make what app the content is posted on? The problem still is the education or lack thereof. The state of the US public school system scares me. The next generation has no life skills, they are taught entitlement and anarchy. It's not tiktok that's doing that.
 
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