The fight for a Montana bill to ban TikTok, which passed in the Senate and will likely pass in the House, previews the legally perilous road for a federal push
A state rep asked if “this generation” was, through TikTok, choosing the CCP “as their new god” — AT&T talked its way out of having to block the app — TikTok quietly used campaign-style tactics to rally users https://www.nytimes.com/... Stu Woo / @stuwoo : Montana's attorney general says passing the TikTok ban will be tough and may ultimately result in a U.S. Supreme Court battle. https://twitter.com/... David McCabe / @dmccabe : New: The Montana legislature is now closer than any other body in the United States to banning TikTok. But the effort has faced obstacles in Helena. It's a preview of what might snarl Congress or the White House if Washington pursues its own TikTok ban. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Montana is running the first live test of a question Washington has only debated: whether a state can actually remove TikTok from its residents' phones. The bill cleared the Senate and is expected to pass the House, after which lawmakers approved the first-of-its-kind ban that also bars app stores from offering the app statewide starting January 1, 2024. The path there was messy enough to be instructive — AT&T negotiated its way out of any blocking obligation, leaving enforcement almost entirely to Apple and Google, while TikTok ran campaign-style user mobilization against the bill.
The legal stakes were flagged from inside Helena itself: Montana's attorney general conceded the ban will be hard to enforce and may end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. That warning proved prescient — after Governor Gianforte signed it, TikTok sued the state on First Amendment grounds, arguing a single state has no authority over a national-security issue, and months later 18 state attorneys general rallied behind Montana's defense in court.
First-order effects
- Montana's ~1.1M TikTok users face losing access via app stores on January 1, 2024, while Apple and Google — not telecoms like AT&T, which negotiated an exemption — absorb the enforcement burden of policing downloads inside one state.
- TikTok must defend the ban in court rather than in Helena's capitol: it filed suit citing the First Amendment and the state's lack of standing on national security, turning a legislative win for Montana into a constitutional fight.
Second-order effects
- A coalition of 18 state attorneys general backed Montana's position, signaling that other states are treating this litigation as a shared template — a favorable precedent would lower the cost for copycat bans, an unfavorable one would chill them.
- ByteDance's later filing urging a U.S. court to strike down a federal-level ban law recycles the same First Amendment argument it deployed against Montana, meaning the state fight functions as a dress rehearsal whose outcome shapes how courts read the national case.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, app stores become the default enforcement layer for geographically scoped platform bans, making two companies' distribution policies the practical choke point for state-level speech regulation — a structure regulators elsewhere can adopt without new legislation.
- State legislatures are positioning themselves as proving grounds for federal action: whichever way the Supreme Court-caliber dispute resolves, it will set the legal boundary conditions — First Amendment authority, state jurisdiction over national security — that any future federal push must operate within.
The trend: Platform bans are moving from congressional debate to state-level legal tests, with app-store enforcement and First Amendment litigation defining what a federal TikTok ban could legally look like.