The federal lawsuit will set the stage for a broader debate over the short-video app and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance.
The popular video app TikTok sued Montana on Monday, saying the state’s new law banning the app statewide would violate Americans’ First Amendment right to free expression.
The federal lawsuit will set the stage for a broader debate over the short-video app and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, which some critics in the United States have said is vulnerable to Chinese government propaganda and espionage.
The lawsuit seeks to overturn the law, which Gov. Greg Gianforte (R) signed last week and is set to go into effect Jan. 1. The legal challenge will probably delay the measure.
Gianforte said the law would “protect Montanans’ private data and sensitive personal information from being harvested by the Chinese Communist Party.” Neither Montana officials nor the U.S. government has supplied evidence supporting that claim.
TikTok, which says it has 150 million monthly active users in the United States, said in its lawsuit that the state’s “extraordinary and unprecedented measures [are] based on nothing more than unfounded speculation.”
In a statement, TikTok spokeswoman Brooke Oberwetter said that the company is “challenging Montana’s unconstitutional TikTok ban to protect our business and the hundreds of thousands of TikTok users in Montana” and that it believes its case “will prevail based on an exceedingly strong set of precedents and facts.”
The lawsuit cited TikTok data from March to estimate that roughly 110,000 monthly active users accessed TikTok around Missoula, the home of the public University of Montana and the second-largest metropolitan area in the state.
Montana officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
