The Chinese-owned app TikTok has been outlawed for the first time in a U.S. state, Montana. The Republican governor Greg Gianforte said this week that he had signed legislation aimed at protecting the citizens of his state from “the Chinese Communist Party.”
In a tweet, Gov. Gianforte said that TikTok had been outlawed in Montana “to protect Montanans’ private and personal information from the Chinese Communist Party.”
Sen. Bill 419, which prohibits the Chinese app from functioning within the state of Montana, was approved by the governor this week, according to a report by KTVH. On January 1st, 2024, the restriction will take effect.
According to Gianforte, “the Chinese Communist Party is well-documented utilizing TikTok in order to spy on Americans, infringe their privacy, and gather their private, personal, and delicate information.”
The governor said, “Today, Montana takes the most significant measure of any state to prevent Montanans’ sensitive personal information and private data from being collected by the Chinese Communist Party.”
According to the statute, the Montana DOJ will have the ability to fine app stores or ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, $10,000 for each individual infraction and another $10,000 for each day that the violation persists.
Additionally, the law forbids tech giants like Apple and Google from making Chinese software available for download. Users of TikTok won’t face any consequences under the legislation; it will only affect how the Chinese software is distributed.
As TikTok is generally seen as a national security concern, state agencies in Montana in addition to the federal government have all already barred the Chinese software from being used on government-owned devices.
Furthermore, TikTok’s parent corporation has previously been exposed on several occasions as spying on journalists in the UK and the US.
As previously revealed by Breitbart News, ByteDance personnel were able to get the confidential user information of American journalists. Recently, it was uncovered that a Chinese business had traced a UK journalist using her cat’s TikTok account, which didn’t even include her true name.
