A U.S. district judge struck down a legal challenge to a Texas law banning the Chinese app TikTok from government devices in the state.
Judge Robert Pitman struck down the challenge on Monday, saying, “the ban is a reasonable restriction on access to TikTok in light of Texas’s concerns” about the Chinese-owned platform, according to a report by HuffPost.
The ruling was in response to a July lawsuit brought by Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute on behalf of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, a non-profit organization made up of journalists, professors, and others, who claim they are trying to promote and defend the right to study the impacts of technology on society.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) announced a “statewide model security plan” for state employees and contractors to follow that prohibits TikTok and other software on government-issued devices as well as the use of prohibited technology-enabled personal devices on government networks (MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images) // Inset: TikTok logo (LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP via Getty Images).
The complaint argued that the legislation was unconstitutional, and that it violated the First Amendment rights of faculty at public universities.
But Judge Pitman said the Texas ban of the Chinese app is a “reasonable, viewpoint-neutral restriction on a nonpublic forum,” and pointed out that the ban is much narrower than bans other states have tried to implement.
“Unlike other states’ more sweeping TikTok bans of late, Texas’s TikTok ban applies only to state devices and networks, leaving those impacted by the ban free to use TikTok on their personal devices on their own networks (as long as they are not used to access state networks),” Pitman wrote.
Last month, a statewide TikTok ban in Montana — which would have prohibited the downloading of the Chinese app in the state starting next year — was blocked by a judge who called the move unconstitutional.
In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs had also acknowledged that many members of the coalition have concerns about TikTok, which “mainly mirror those that have been raised about other major commercial platforms, including American platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.”
The worries derived from TikTok’s connection to the communist regime “are speculative, but even if they were grounded in evidence, they could not justify the application of Texas’s TikTok ban to faculty at public universities,” the plaintiffs claimed.
As Breitbart News reported, TikTok is widely understood to be Chinese surveillance and psyops thinly veiled as a social media platform. It has been known to result in physical danger among kids and teens, a national security threat, and having meddled in U.S. elections. Meanwhile, its parent company, China’s ByteDance, has been caught snooping on U.S. journalists.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X/Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.