HELENA — President Donald Trump has again delayed implementation of a federal law that could ban the app TikTok – which likely means yet another delay in the court case challenging Montana’s TikTok ban.
On Thursday, Trump officially announced that he would stop his administration from enforcing the federal law until at least Sept. 17. It’s the third time he’s delayed it since returning to office in January.
The federal law, passed in the spring of 2024, gave TikTok’s Chinese-based parent company ByteDance a year to sell the app or face a national ban. Supporters cited concerns that the app could expose users’ data to China, claims the company has always denied.
Trump’s latest decision will give another 90 days for the federal government to work on a possible deal for TikTok’s sale.
Meanwhile, Montana’s ban on the app, passed during the 2023 state legislative session, has now been sitting in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals since May 2024 with no action. TikTok itself and a group of Montana-based content creators who used the app filed suit, claiming the ban violated free expression rights. After a federal district judge blocked the state from enforcing the law, Attorney General Austin Knudsen appealed that decision to the 9th Circuit.
Last year, all the parties in the case agreed it made sense to delay moving forward until legal challenges to the federal ban were resolved – particularly because the Montana case includes questions about whether the state overstepped onto federal authority. Earlier this year, they asked the court to continue the stay on proceedings “pending the President’s determination of an appropriate course of action with respect to TikTok.”
The stay is currently set to expire Aug. 14, but the parties could seek to extend that once again.
Depending on what happens at the federal level, the Montana ban could become a moot point anyway. Senate Bill 419 will automatically be void if ByteDance sells TikTok to an owner outside China.
