A group of 18 state attorneys general said on Monday they backed Montana’s effort to ban Chinese-owned short video app TikTok, urging a U.S. judge to reject legal challenges ahead of the Jan. 1 effective date. The state attorneys general led by Virginia and including Georgia, Alaska, Utah, Indiana, Nebraska, Iowa, Kentucky, and South Dakota, said in a court filing that the suits from TikTok and users should be rejected because of a lack of legal justification.
A separate suit filed by five TikTok content creators argues that Montana’s first-of-its-kind ban violates free speech rights and says the state is exercising powers over national security matters it shouldn’t have. Montana Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte signed the law Wednesday, expecting a fight to follow.
The lawsuits seek to prevent the ban from taking effect until the courts have ruled on them. It’s the latest effort to regulate or block the app popular among young people for its goofy videos and easy-to-use features. Its popularity in the United States has prompted lawmakers to introduce legislation to crack down on it, and tech companies have raised concerns about how much personal information the app gathers about its users.
Gianforte’s legislation, drafted by state Attorney General Austin Knudsen, cites concerns about the Chinese government’s use of TikTok to collect data on U.S. citizens and to push pro-Beijing misinformation. The law also bars the use of the app on devices used to access sensitive state information. The state CIO has issued a memorandum barring employees from using devices that run the app and products from several manufacturers, including Kaspersky, TikTok owner ByteDance, and Tencent Holdings. It also bars equipment purchased from Dahua Technology Company, ZTE Corporation, Huawei Technologies Company, and Hytera Communications Corporation.
The new state lawsuit asks the court to force TikTok to comply with subpoenas for documents related to its user base, age verification, data collection, content curation and beauty filters, community guidelines, and the app’s relationship with the Chinese government. It accuses the company of stonewalling and “failed to credibly explain why one of the world’s largest technology companies can’t respond within a reasonable time frame.”
TikTok has said the request is overly broad and requests data that would jeopardize its business model and the privacy of its customers. The company has also argued it can’t answer the questions because they are related to national security and that federal laws protect its data from being turned over to a foreign government.
A spokeswoman for the state Attorney General’s office waited to respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. A rep for TechNet, a trade group that counts Apple and Google among its members, said the two companies shouldn’t be forced to geofence apps to block them in some states. The company’s legal team has pushed back against the requests, saying it is up to individual app stores to determine whether they can accept an application and that it should be on the apps themselves to decide where they can operate.
