Montana becomes first US state to ban Tik Tok

TikTok is just one app tied to foreign adversaries. Today I directed the state’s Chief Information Officer to ban any application that provides personal information or data to foreign adversaries from the state network. pic.twitter.com/92Im6D9Jgx

— Governor Greg Gianforte (@GovGianforte) May 17, 2023

The Montana state Congress last month approved a bill aimed at banning the platform, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, on the mobile devices of all its inhabitants.

Montana’s prohibition is the harshest approved so far by a territory of the North American nation and goes beyond the veto that the federal government and half of the 50 states of the country have implemented so that public officials cannot have TikTok on their cell phones.

Various sectors, including The FBI, members of Congress and state authorities have expressed concern about the possibility that TikTok could be used by Beijing for espionage work.since the application is owned by a company based in China.

The Asian country has security laws that could force technology companies to share data with their intelligence services, but TikTok and other companies argue that such concerns are nonsense and that they have implemented various measures to protect their users’ data.

Last March, US media reported that the Joe Biden government threatened ByteDance, owner of TikTok, to ban the social network throughout the United States if it does not sell the shares they have in the popular application.