Montana’s attorney general is standing by the state's ban of TikTok, despite being sued by the company over alleged First Amendment violations.
"I'm not interested in recognizing that the Chinese Communist Party has free speech rights under the U.S. Constitution," Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen told Fox News.
The TikTok ban was sparked by an investigation that found the app can be used by the Chinese government to spy on American citizens and push pro-China propaganda. TikTok denies the findings and filed a lawsuit last month claiming that the law violates the First Amendment.
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"We are challenging Montana’s unconstitutional TikTok ban to protect our business and the hundreds of thousands of TikTok users in Montana," a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement. "We believe our legal challenge will prevail based on an exceedingly strong set of precedents and facts."
Knudsen said his investigation found that TikTok is the only social media app which does not allow users to opt out of having their data collected. He said the app can collect facial recognition data, thumbprints, all keystrokes on phones and more.
"TikTok is scanning all of your photographs and your videos for intelligence, military intelligence," he said. "So this is a very dangerous application that's collecting an awful lot of data and transmitting it straight to the Chinese Communist Party via ByteDance."
The law, due to take effect in January, bans the app popular among young Americans and owned by the Chinese tech company ByteDance. Penalties include a $10,000 per day for app stores and TikTok each time someone is able to access or download the app.
"So the way we decided to go about this ban is not to go after TikTok users," Knudsen said. "That's not something that we're interested in doing and that's specifically precluded in this law that we wrote."
Critics of the law, including the ACLU, called it unconstitutional and raised concerns about it restricting free speech.
"With this ban, Governor Gianforte and the Montana legislature have trampled on the free speech of hundreds of thousands of Montanans who use the app to express themselves, gather information, and run their small business in the name of anti-Chinese sentiment," said Keegan Medrano, policy director at the ACLU of Montana. "We will never trade our First Amendment rights for cheap political points."
Knudsen said he disagreed with the ACLU’s statement, claiming that "national security takes precedence."
He added that Montana's legislation includes language to allow the ban to be lifted if TikTok becomes an American company.
"This has nothing to do with content," he said. "This really is about TikTok being used as a spying tool for the Chinese Communist Party.
"You wouldn't allow your neighbor to see certain private photographs and videos on your phone but we're going to allow the Chinese Communist Party to have access to that data and to be able to scan your photographs for anything they can use of military intelligence value," he said. "That's horrifying."
Knudsen said that parents should be worried about the content children are seeing on the app.
"You have to understand that the TikTok that's presented in China to the Chinese people are vastly different than the TikTok we get exposed to here in the US," he said. "It's been well documented that the TikTok that's provided to America is full of all kinds of dangerous content. It's full of drug content, suicide content, pornography, sexually explicit content."
Kudsen said that he expected the law to be challenged which was "part of the calculus" when the legislation was crafted, adding that federal courts are going to be needed to weigh in.
"We were never under any illusion that we were going to get through this without a lawsuit or two, but there really are some issues here that I think we need the federal courts to step in and answer for us, because our law really hasn't kept up with social media," he said.
Knudsen added that he thinks Congress should have stepped in.
"We needed the federal Congress to act here," he said. "They wouldn't do it. They haven't done it and that's why the state of Montana stepped up."
