Adopted in April and promulgated on May 17 by the Republican governor of Montana, the text that prohibits the TikTok application “is so unconstitutional that it is laughable, and so difficult to implement that it is comical,” summed up this Thursday Evan Greer, director of the NGO. Fight for the future.
TikTok is owned by the Chinese group ByteDance, and many US lawmakers believe the platform for short, entertaining videos, viewed by 150 million people in the US, allows Beijing to spy on and manipulate users. The app has always denied it.
The new law orders mobile app stores (Apple and Google) to stop distributing TikTok as of January 1, 2024. Affected companies risk fines of $10,000 per day for each violation, but users are not they will worry
An argument that the Montana Democrats-elect had already made during the debates. Zooey Zephyr, in particular, noted that residents can still download the app simply by going over the border to neighboring states or by using a VPN that allows internet access from another location.
“Great Wall” of Montana
According to Michael Daniel, director of the Cyber Threat Alliance, a cybersecurity NGO, the law does not answer two key questions. It does not specify what will happen to users who already have TikTok on their phone, other than that they will theoretically no longer be able to update the app. Above all, it does not explain how to accurately identify the inhabitants of this sparsely populated state.
“TikTok could track the geolocation of users, but that would be reprehensible in terms of data privacy for everyone on the platform,” said Jason Kelley of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an NGO for the protection of internet freedoms.
Associations and experts are surprised that US elected officials who mainly accuse TikTok of serving as a Trojan horse for the Chinese Communist Party seem willing to resort to authoritarian methods.
The only way the Montana legislature would enforce their law would be to “follow China’s lead and monitor every phone of everyone in the state. They would have to build the Great Wall of Montana Computers,” says Tara Wheeler, chief of Red Queen. Dynamics, a cybersecurity company.
constitutionality
In addition to technical obstacles, the new law has everything to be challenged in court. On Wednesday, five users and content creators filed lawsuits, citing free speech and asking a Montana court to block the ban.
Therefore, the text has “great chances of being considered unconstitutional,” he explains. Et si jamais une affaire remontait jusqu’à la Cour suprême des Etats-Unis, dominée par des juges républicains, “même les conservateurs n’aiment pas que le gouvernement dise aux citoyens ce qu’ils peuvent lire ou pas”, souligne-t -she.
The app is already banned by many organizations, from federal agencies in the United States to the European Commission and the BBC. And as anti-China sentiment rises in the West, the White House is discussing several bills with Congress to ban the social network from the country altogether, even though Donald Trump failed to do so in 2020.
“We are a long way from a real implementation,” said Lyrissa Lidsky. “Elected officials think it’s enough to pass a law to score points in the political arena.”
Source: BFM TV
