Montana Governor Greg Gianforte has announced the TikTok app ban, thus becoming the first US state to take this measure. A decision that Gianforte has justified “to protect the personal and private data of the inhabitants of Montana from the Chinese Communist Party”, as he has indicated through Twitter.

According to the Republican governor, “TikTok is just an app linked to foreign adversaries“And for this reason, he says, he has ordered the state information director to ban from the state network “any application that provides information or personal data to foreign adversaries.”

The Montana state Congress already tested a bill last month aimed at banning the platform on the mobile devices of all its inhabitants. This ban is the toughest passed so far for a US territory and goes beyond the veto that the federal government and half of the 50 states of the North American country have implemented so that public officials cannot have TikTok on their mobile phones.

This controversial law, which occurs in a context in which some lawmakers have called for a nationwide ban of the app marks a further step in the restriction of TikTok, owned by a China-based company, after security concerns have grown in the West regarding its possible use as a Trojan horse to promote pro-TikTok propaganda. Beijing or collect user data.

In the US, various sectors, including the FBI, members of Congress and state authorities, have expressed concern about the possibility that TikTok could be used by China to espionage work. The Asian country has security laws that could force technology companies to share data with its intelligence services, but TikTok and other companies argue that such concerns are nonsense and that they have implemented measures to protect the data of their users.

According to US media reports in March, the Government of Joe Biden has even threatened ByteDance with banning the social network throughout the North American country if they do not sell the shares they have in the popular application, with some 100 million users in the United States and one of the most popular social networks in the world, especially among adolescents.

The Chinese authorities, for their part, have denounced that, after the cascade of vetoes in recent months by several countries – the US, the UK and the EU – in public administration devices, there is a hidden political intentionality without real technological justification.