Montana’s TikTok Ban: How Is It Being Enforced?

Spoiler alert: as of this writing, it isn’t.

While a proposed US ban on the Chinese-owned social media platform was being debated, approved, and finally signed into law in early 2024, Montana took the issue into its own hands. The state passed its own TikTok ban in May 2023 and it was due to take effect on January 1, 2024.

However, two months before that date, a federal judge blocked the Montana law from taking effect. That ruling went to the US Court of Appeals for review, and no action has been taken by the Appeals Court more than a year later.

That’s probably because the national TikTok ban remains in abeyance. The US Supreme Court upheld the law prohibiting TikTok’s operations in America, but enforcement was put on hold by executive order while negotiations were underway for the potential sale of the app to US owners.

Since a nationwide ban would make any Montana ban unnecessary, everything seems to be on hold until the issue is resolved at the national level, and the Montana TikTok law has never been enforced.

What would have happened if the state had been able to go ahead with its prohibitions on TikTok? Here’s what the law provided — and the dilemmas it would likely have caused.

Montana’s TikTok Ban: Proposed Enforcement

Most importantly for any readers in Montana, the state’s law was not designed to penalize individual TikTok users. They wouldn’t have faced fines or other penalties for spending time on the platform. The law was intended to stop the distribution and availability of the social platform to people in Montana.

• Google Play and the Apple App Store were banned from offering TikTok for download within the state. They would be fined $10,000 per day for each person who downloaded the app in Montana.
• TikTok would be liable for fines of $10,000 per day that it “operated” in the state, and the same amount for every person who accessed TikTok from Montana or was “offered” either TikTok access or an app download.

It’s still not clear how the actual enforcement was supposed to work, though. Identifying the number of times TikTok was used in Montana would require either court orders forcing TikTok, Google, and Apple to disclose customer data, or massive surveillance of the state’s citizens. Both approaches are considered unlikely to have been realistic.

Making things even more difficult, people wishing to access TikTok could have easily used virtual private networks (VPNs) to hide their location and make their use of the app “invisible” to state enforcers. The law also does not require Internet service providers to comply in any way, meaning the use of the app couldn’t be tracked through Montana ISPs.

In short, enforcement of Montana’s law would be problematic at best — and with the US TikTok ban still pending, the issue of state enforcement remains moot.