“It's clearly unconstitutional,” Pfefferkorn says. “He admitted the purpose was to keep people from both saying and hearing legal speech. It’s an easy case."

More broadly, researchers have long warned that banning TikTok is incompatible with the democratic principles of the open internet. The US has consistently condemned platform blocks, content filtering, and internet shutdowns when other governments impose them on their citizens. These repressive digital tactics have been on the rise globally in recent years. Yet many US officials and lawmakers at both the state and federal levels have called for a TikTok ban.

“When ISPs and browser makers and tech companies are forced to develop technical methods to block access to networks and domains, it has very serious implications,” says Joseph Lorenzo Hall, a distinguished technologist at the Internet Society, a nonprofit that promotes an open internet. “It enables  fragmentation or what we call the ‘splinternet.’ Communications platforms are a light switch in the dark. Marginalized communities use TikTok in ways that aren’t just ‘ha ha, let’s do a dance.’”

In March, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a hearing that largely devolved into anxious, Footloose-esque ruminations about child safety. Lawmakers raised concerns about TikTok that could be said of any social media platform and seemed to repeatedly, if unintentionally, make the case for comprehensive national privacy legislation in the US.

Meanwhile, even though Montana's ban will face legal challenges if passed, the very fact of its creation may embolden other states or even the federal government to consider paths to a TikTok ban, tipping off a chain reaction that could have profound impacts on freedom of digital expression in the US and around the world. 

“It’s a maddening irony that American legislators’ idea for countering China is to act more like China, home of the Great Firewall that censors its citizens’ free access to the flow of information,” Stanford's Pfefferkorn says. “Banning a popular social media app, especially on the basis of speculative concerns, is directly contrary to the vision of a free and open internet that the US has long promulgated abroad as part of our commitment to democracy.”