Tiktok, a video-sharing app, has filed a lawsuit against Montana over a recent law that forbids the use of the service there.
After Republican Governor Greg Gianforte approved the bill on Wednesday, Montana became the first state in the US to outlaw the app. In January 2024, the law is expected to go into effect.
Gainforte stated that the purpose of the measure was “to protect the personal and private information of Montanans from the Chinese Communist Party.”
A spokeswoman for TikTok told CBS News that the ban was “unconstitutional” and expressed confidence that the firm would win the legal battle to overturn it.
“We are challenging Montana’s unconstitutional TikTok ban to protect our business and the hundreds of thousands of TikTok users in Montana,” the statement read. “We believe our legal challenge will prevail based on an exceedingly strong set of precedents and facts.”
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The company argued in the suit that the ban “effects a prior restraint on the speech of Plaintiff and other TikTok users, unconstitutionally shutting down the forum for speech for all speakers on the app and singling these speakers out for disfavored treatment with the content-based rationale that videos on TikTok are harmful to minors.”
Another ground for challenging the ban, as stated in the suit, was that security concerns about the Chinese government having access to user data fell under the authority of the US government rather than an individual state.
Already, TikTok content creators in Montana have taken the state government to court over the ban, which threatens their livelihood.
The group filed the complaint on Wednesday, just hours after the governor assented to the bill. According to them, the ban violates their First Amendment right to access and create “lawful speech.”
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