The lower house of this northwestern US state, majority Republican, voted Thursday by 60 votes in favor of 39 votes against SB419 which "bans TikTok in Montana".

The final vote is scheduled for Friday - the Senate had already approved this text in March. Once ratified by the governor, it is scheduled to enter into force on January 1, 2024.

"It's time to stand up to the Chinese and ban TikTok," said Representative Brandon Ler after an indictment of China that "wants our data and our intellectual property" and an application dangerous for "health and safety, especially of the youngest".

From Montana to the White House, many elected Democrats and Republicans accuse the application of short and entertaining videos of being used by the Chinese government to spy on and manipulate users.

The U.S. Congress is working on bills to ban it in the country.

TikTok, which has always denied these allegations, has been trying for several years to reassure the authorities, to no avail.

"This law is a shocking violation of the rights of Montana residents to freedom of expression" and a "disastrous precedent," Vanessa Pappas, TikTok's chief operating officer, said after the Senate vote in early March.

The text "will exclude Montana from a community of 150 million people in the United States," she insisted.

The follow-up in court

According to a spokeswoman for the app contacted Thursday, the authors of this law "have themselves admitted that they have no realistic plan to put into practice this attempt to censor American voices".

"The constitutionality of this text will be decided in the courts. We will continue to fight for TikTok users and creators in Montana," she added.

The law prohibits app stores, which are essentially Google (Android) and Apple (iOS), from distributing TikTok to users in Montana.

Apple and Google did not immediately respond to AFP's requests for comment.

The text mentions fines for offending companies, but not for users. It also states that the law would be invalidated if TikTok was acquired by a company from a country "not considered an enemy" of the United States.

Several independent experts noted that the law would certainly be challenged in court, and was unlikely to be enforced.

"It raises a lot of thorny questions, and we don't see how the state is going to be able to defend itself and win," said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond.

"The people of Montana want as few regulations as possible," he said. "We certainly couldn't take their guns from them."

- 'Anti-Chinese prejudices' -

"SB419 perfectly encapsulates the absurdity and bigotry of the Montana Assembly," Keegan Medrano, an official with the local branch of the powerful civil rights group ACLU, tweeted Wednesday.

"The ban on TikTok is unconstitutional in terms of freedom of expression, impractical as it exempts internet service providers and VPNs (virtual private networks) and driven by anti-Chinese prejudice."

At the end of March, the boss of the application, Shou Chew, faced attacks from elected officials of a US parliamentary committee during a hearing lasting several hours.

Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House spokeswoman, had mentioned in the wake of the "ongoing negotiations with ByteDance" and said that the government "strongly supported" the RESTRICT Act, one of the bills to ban TikTok.

Unless ByteDance finds an American buyer for the platform in "three to six months", "TikTok will probably be banned by the end of the year," said analyst Dan Yves of Webdush Securities.

The service is already banned on the smartphones of civil servants and employees of many organizations, from the European Commission to the Canadian, British and American governments.

© 2023 AFP