Courts & Litigation Cybersecurity & Tech

The Lawfare Podcast: How Are the TikTok Bans Holding Up in Court?

Quinta Jurecic, Matt Perault, Ramya Krishnan, Mary-Rose Papandrea, Jen Patja
Wednesday, January 3, 2024, 8:00 AM
What should we make of the ruling that found that the Montana law banning TikTok likely violated the First Amendment?

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In May 2023, Montana passed a new law that would ban the use of TikTok within the state starting on January 1, 2024. But as of today, TikTok is still legal in the state of Montana—thanks to a preliminary injunction issued by a federal district judge, who found that the Montana law likely violated the First Amendment. In Texas, meanwhile, another federal judge recently upheld a more limited ban against the use of TikTok on state-owned devices. What should we make of these rulings, and how should we understand the legal status of efforts to ban TikTok?

We’ve discussed the question of TikTok bans and the First Amendment before on the Lawfare Podcast, when Lawfare Senior Editor Alan Rozenshtein and Matt Perault, Director of the Center on Technology Policy at UNC-Chapel Hill, sat down with Ramya Krishnan, a staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, and Mary-Rose Papandrea, the Samuel Ashe Distinguished Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law. In light of the Montana and Texas rulings, Matt and Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic decided to bring the gang back together and talk about where the TikTok bans stand with Ramya and Mary-Rose, on this episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the information ecosystem.


Quinta Jurecic is a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and a senior editor at Lawfare. She previously served as Lawfare's managing editor and as an editorial writer for the Washington Post.
Matt Perault is the director of the Center on Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a consultant on technology policy issues.
Ramya Krishnan is a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, specializing in issues related to government transparency, protest, privacy, and social media.
Mary-Rose Papandrea is the Samuel Ashe Distinguished Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law.
Jen Patja is the editor and producer of The Lawfare Podcast and Rational Security. She currently serves as the Co-Executive Director of Virginia Civics, a nonprofit organization that empowers the next generation of leaders in Virginia by promoting constitutional literacy, critical thinking, and civic engagement. She is the former Deputy Director of the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier and has been a freelance editor for over 20 years.

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