A Montana judge on Thursday blocked a state ban on TikTok from going into effect.
The social media app filed a lawsuit in Montana’s US District Court in May, claiming the law violated the First Amendment and seeking to block the state from enforcing the ban.
U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy said the ban overstepped state authority and “violated the constitutional rights of users and businesses,” the Associated Press reported.
Montana is the first state with a law that seeks to ban the social media platform from operating in the state and prohibit app stores from offering TikTok to residents as early as 1 January 2024.
The state’s Republican legislature is the first to pass an outright ban on the app, arguing that the platform’s parent company ByteDance is based in Beijing and that the Chinese government could obtain user information from the app.
The app has said the state could limit the amount of user data collected by the platform rather than impose an outright ban, and lawyers for the company said the state had gone “completely overboard” in its attempts to regulate the social media app.
The judge said that while the state claimed it was trying to protect users’ data, it had shown it was “more interested in targeting China’s alleged role in TikTok”, the AP reported.
TikTok has been banned on official devices by more than half of the US states and the federal government. The company has said the restrictions are unnecessary.
Virginia and 17 other Republican-led states filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of Montana’s law in September, calling it “the latest in a long tradition of consumer protection laws.”
Molloy wrote Thursday that state Attorney General Austin Knudsen, who drafted the law, could instead provide public service announcements warning people about the data TikTok collects, since most users agree to the company’s data collection policies to use the app.
Cybersecurity experts say that even if the judge allows the Montana law to be implemented, it could be difficult to enforce.