An earlier version of the bill would have required internet service providers to block connections to TikTok in Montana, a task that ISP representatives said was not feasible. A trade association representing the companies that run mobile app stores, namely Google and Apple, also told the Montana legislature that it would be virtually impossible to stop TikTok downloads in Montana.
Google declined to comment. Apple did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Riana Pfefferkorn, an academic researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory, says Montana Attorney General Knudsen’s claims about a “next frontier in First Amendment jurisprudence” are overblown, particularly given the attorney general’s comments during the recent Times interview. In it, Knudsen specifically noted that his office was motivated to seek an outright ban on TikTok after hearing protests from parents that TikTok posts included discussions of drug use, pornography and suicide.
“It’s clearly unconstitutional,” says Pfefferkorn. “He admitted that the purpose was to prevent people from saying and listening to legal speech. It’s an easy case.”
More generally, researchers have long warned that banning TikTok is incompatible with democratic principles of the open internet. the United States has consistently condemned platform blocks, content filtering and internet shutdowns when other governments impose them on their citizens. These repressive digital tactics have been in the rise worldwide in recent years. However, many US officials and lawmakers, both at the state and federal levels, have called for a ban on TikTok.
“When ISPs, browser manufacturers, and technology companies are forced to develop technical methods to block access to networks and domains, this has very serious implications,” says Joseph Lorenzo Hall, distinguished technologist at the Internet Society, a nonprofit organization. for-profit that promotes an open Internet. . “It allows fragmentation or what we call ‘splinternet’. Communications platforms are a light switch in the dark. Marginalized communities use TikTok in ways that aren’t just ‘ha ha let’s do a dance’.”
In March, the CEO of TikTok Shou Zi Chew testified before the House Committee on Commerce and Energy in a hearing that resulted in much anxiety, Mercilessly-esque musings on the safety of children. Lawmakers raised concerns about TikTok that could be said about any social media platform and repeatedly appeared, if unintentionally, advocate for comprehensive national privacy legislation In the USA.
Meanwhile, while the Montana ban will face legal challenges if it passes, the very fact of its creation may encourage other states or even the federal government to consider Paths to a TikTok Bansetting off a chain reaction that could have a profound impact on digital freedom of expression in the US and around the world.
“It is a maddening irony that the idea of US lawmakers to counter China is to act more like China, home to the Great Firewall that censors its citizens’ free access to the flow of information,” says Stanford’s Pfefferkorn. “Banning a popular social media app, especially on the basis of speculative concerns, runs directly counter to the vision of a free and open Internet that the United States has long enacted abroad as part of our commitment to democracy.”