Governor of Montana, Greg Gianforte has now signed a law making
Montana the first state to officially ban TikTok.
And I don't mean the way some other states have banned TikTok for
government employees or something like that.
No, this is just a ban.
The idea is it's gonna be gone.
Who knows if that actually happens, we'll speculate, but that's the goal, he says,
to protect Montana's personal and private data of from the Chinese Communist Party,
I have banned TikTok in Montana.
Of course, I feel the need to point out that they have said that there is no
access to that information, it's the US subsidiary.
You can believe or not believe that, whatever, he clearly doesn't.
So the legislation would prohibit the operation of TikTok in Montana by
the company, by users.
Internet service providers can't offer it,
mobile application stores can't allow you to download it.
So that's obviously targeted at the Google Play store and Apple as well.
The Montana DOJ will be responsible for investigating any potential violations of
the ban ISPs and companies that violate it would face a $10,000 fine per day for
each violation, while residents would not be fined.
This is sort of similar to the way that they're trying to outlaw abortion,
which is they do a radical thing, but they put it not on the person doing it,
hoping that we won't seem radical.
Then it's still an incredibly radical move to ban it.
Look, I think it's a complicated topic and
thank God I'm not the person who has to figure out exactly what should be done.
But this seems like a pretty fast, pretty over the top reaction.
What do you think, Miranda?
Are you a toker?
What do you think?
>> I mean, I have a TikTok for the sake of being able to look at TikToks for my job.
I don't post on there and I don't really search on there, but
I do see them on the Instagram for you page.
So it's basically like being on TikTok, but just like two weeks later.
My first question when I saw this was the enforcement of the ban of
TikTok in Montana.
So if I'm traveling through Montana and I already have the app or
it seems like a really weird, strange thing to enforce.
And so I'm curious to see how they're gonna try and do that.
I think they're trying to implement it on the first, but
getting to the heart of the topic.
You're right, it's controversial and it's a very complicated topic and
I also don't know what the exact right move is, but this seems like a way
to prevent people from seeing information, from sharing information.
A lot of people make money off of TikTok these days and so
it seems like a very over the top censorship move to me.
>> Yeah, it also seems like for young people, for tech savvy people,
it feels like you'd be able to get around it with a VPN or
jailbreaking your phone, downloading it outside of the App Store.
Probably even easier than that.
I probably don't even know some of the clever ways they would get around it, but
this does actually, by the way, unless they change it, they could change the law.
But immediately I thought have you seen the movie Air I was talking about on
the show yesterday?
>> I haven't, no [CROSSTALK].
>> Okay, so it's about the development of Air Jordans or whatever, and
one of the fun little things is in the trailer, so it's not a spoiler.
Is the NBA required that, like 51% of the shoe had to be white or something at that
point, and they wanted to make one that had more red to appeal to Michael Jordan.
And they were like, if we don't, we'll be fined $5,000 per game.
And so one of them is like, so we'll pay it.
Think about this, ISPs will all be fined unless they ban TikTok.
But one ISP could be like, you know what?
We stand for free speech, we stand for you getting access to what you want.
We're the ISP that's gonna pay for it as an advertisement, so
that you'll come to that ISP.
I feel like you could totally do that.
I feel like Apple and Google could definitely afford the $10,000.
They'll probably change it to jack up the prices or whatever, but
that would be my assumption of how that would play out.
>> Yeah, $10,000 is not much, it's a drop in the bucket, really,
when it comes to advertisement for your right like Apple or Google.
>> Yeah, and also, look, we're gonna get into the addiction stuff in just one SEC,
but there are a lot of related issues with social media,
with people's addictions, their phones, with AI, all this stuff.
Like, everybody's really like, what do we do?
So let's just do something crazy.
But could you at least briefly think, does this even solve the problem?
Let's say that you succeed and TikTok goes bye bye because of something Greg G and
Forte say.
It's not gonna happen, but let's say that it did.
Vine was around, they got rid of that.
There will just be another app, it'll just spread really fast.
This is not a societal solution to a problem,
this is a temporary technological stopgap.
That's all it is.
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