The governor of Montana (US), Republican Greg Gianforte, signed a law on Wednesday banning the use of the Chinese application TikTokbecoming the first state in the country to restrict the popular social platform.

Gianforte reported the move on his Twitter account: “To protect the private and personal data of the Chinese Communist Party mountaineers, I have banned TikTok in the state,” he wrote.

Montana State Congress passed a bill last month to ban the platform, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, from the mobile devices of all its residents.

Montana’s ban is the strictest passed on U.S. territory to date, going beyond the veto that the federal government and half of the country’s 50 states have put in place so officials can’t have TikTok on their cell phones.

Various sectors, including the FBI, members of Congress and government agencies, have spoken out concern over the possibility that TikTok could be used by Beijing for espionage work, because the app is owned by a China-based company.

The Asian country has security laws that could force tech companies to share data with their intelligence agencies, but TikTok and other companies claim that such concerns are nonsense and that they have taken several measures to protect their users’ data.

As reported in the US media in March, Joe Biden’s government has threatened TikTok owner ByteDance to ban the social network in the United States if it does not sell the shares they hold in the popular application.

TikTok has about 100 million users in the United States and has quickly become one of the most popular social networks in the world. especially among teenagers.