![]() Montana’s TikTok ban leaves users, business owners reeling The dependence some creators have on TikTok makes it a direct infringement of their First Amendment rights to ban the app in Montana, District Judge Donald Molloy wrote in his opinion Thursday. And an increasing number of creators, small business owners and other TikTok users are now relying on the platform for their livelihoods. TikTok announced earlier this year that it reached the milestone 150 million monthly active users in the United States. But millions of personal devices in the United States can still freely access TikTok.Īll the while, TikTok has only cemented its vast and growing reach in the country. ![]() Policymakers have alleged that Chinese intelligence laws could force ByteDance to expose TikTok’s US user data to the Chinese government, but so far US officials have not publicly presented any concrete evidence of unauthorized government data access.Ĭalls for a TikTok ban in the US first arose during the Trump administration and have waxed and waned in the years since, but most attempts to ban the app have been challenged in court. The only government bans that have been effective at limiting TikTok have been those at the federal and state levels targeting its use on official government devices. The Montana suit was brought by TikTok and a group of content creators after the state enacted a bill, SB419, that would have prohibited the app from operating on personal electronic devices within state lines.īoth cases reflected concerns expressed by government officials at all levels in the United States about TikTok’s ties to China through its parent company, ByteDance. The lawsuit in Indiana sought court-ordered fines and restrictions on TikTok for allegedly violating state consumer protection laws. That the states’ could not clear even the most elemental legal hurdles highlights the challenge ahead for policymakers who are struggling to articulate a concrete problem their legal tools can solve. “So when you put them in front of a non-political decisionmaker, they look ridiculous.” Those results reveal how the state attempts to regulate TikTok “are clearly pretextual and designed for political theater,” Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, told CNN. In both cases, efforts to crack down on TikTok failed to pass rudimentary checks such as whether they complied with the First Amendment or whether the court even had jurisdiction in the matter, according to Thursday’s rulings. ![]() But the early-stage results in both states show that when the hot-button politics of TikTok came face-to-face with the most fundamental basics of American law, the politics lost. Neither case has reached a final outcome. A pair of back-to-back court victories for TikTok this week have threatened to make it harder for the company’s critics to clamp down on it, after a state judge in Indiana threw out one lawsuit against the popular short-form video app and a federal judge blocked a first-of-its-kind Montana law that would have banned the app statewide.
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