Montana’s lawmakers have decided to take a page out of a playbook more suited for Iran or Belarus by banning TikTok from polluting Big Sky Country. The rationale is that the social media platform (operated by a U.S. subsidiary of a Chinese technology company) poses some dire security threat and that Montanans will become unwitting victims in a vast Chinese data gathering and psychological warfare campaign. This is not unique to Montana as politicians across the country and within the halls of Congress have articulated similar fears. It is not surprising that many government agencies and corporations have blocked TikTok from their own devices, if for no other reason than because of potential effects on productivity, but this Montana legislation takes concern to the realm of hysteria. The Montana law not only bars the application from sensitive government machines but expands the prohibition to private citizens operating personal devices on private internet connections and national wireless networks.

Whether or not such an all-encompassing ban is constitutional or even possible, Montana’s efforts highlight a major inconsistency in government concerns viz-a-viz social media platforms. While there has been considerable regulatory and legislative force applied to TikTok’s largely theoretical dangers, there has been surprisingly little attention paid to Meta/Facebook for their very real threats to both democracy and privacy. Yes, Mark Zuckerberg has been called to testify before Congress, but no one has floated a Facebook ban that has made any progress. This calls into question the motives behind efforts like that in Montana and hint at an alternative reason states (particularly Republican controlled states) seem so fixated on TikTok rather than Facebook. The former is a well known haven for left-leaning content creators and individuals unhappy with or terrified by the GOP’s militant reactionary politics. Don’t, however, mistake Republican vitriol towards TikTok as evidence of love for Meta – Meta’s political donations tend to favor Democrats and Facebook is usually lumped in with pre-Elon Musk Twitter as incubators of radical liberal propaganda. Even allowing for this, TikTok continues to be targeted with the platform’s foreign ownership acting as a convenient excuse to call for bans without coming across as completely authoritarian.

But beyond the politics and beyond the posturing, a statewide ban against a mobile app demonstrates the lack of understanding many lawmakers have when it comes to matters of technology and shows how I’ll-equipped elected officials are to handle the complex issues of the very near future. The Montana legislature and Governor Gianforte seem to not realize that the internet is not specific to particular jurisdictions and that individual states are unlikely to create their own ‘authorized’ internets without violating countless interstate commerce rules, to say nothing of First Amendment freedoms. The government in Helena is acting like the government in Tehran, but without having the same control over the infrastructure. Governor Gianforte seems to think this new law will grant him a button on his desk enabling him to turn off portions of the internet at will without fully appreciating you can’t do that, certainly not without upsetting a lot of wealthy and powerful entities in the process.