The bill would effectively beef up a TikTok ban on state-owned devices that Democratic Gov. Tony Evers approved through executive order two years ago. Republicans had introduced a bill banning the popular social media platform as well as the messaging platform WeChat, both of which are owned by Chinese companies, on state devices, but that was rendered moot by the executive order.
But with the rise of DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence platform, it's clear that banning apps one by one isn't enough to keep state devices secure, bill authors Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, R-Appleton, Rep. Dan Knodl, R-Germantown, and Rep. Nate Gustafson, R-Fox Crossing, wrote in a memo to lawmakers.
The bill seeks to ban apps and platforms on state devices from China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela under Nicolás Maduro's authoritarian rule. All of those countries are on the U.S. Department of Commerce's country of concern list.
While well-intentioned, the Executive Order and the static list approach are no longer sufficient to meet the rapidly evolving threats in today’s digital landscape," the bill's authors wrote. "Foreign adversaries continue to develop and deploy new technologies designed to harvest data, conduct surveillance, spread misinformation and potentially access critical infrastructure.
"By the time a specific application is identified and listed, dozens more may have emerged — leaving a critical window of vulnerability."
Here's how Medicaid changes could affect Wisconsin
Signed into law on July 4, President Donald Trump's budget reconciliation bill extends Trump's 2017 multi-trillion dollar tax cuts and cuts Medicaid and food stamps by $1.2 trillion.
The bill is currently seeking co-sponsors and has not been formally introduced.
The law would not apply to law enforcement officers, and it would not ban usage of the apps on any personal devices of state employees or other residents.
In 2023, Evers decided to ban TikTok from state-owned devices under pressure form Republican lawmakers. At the time, only about a dozen state employees had TikTok downloaded onto their devices.
Fire outside Rep. Glenn Grothman's office motivated by TikTok ban, police say
Grothman had voted last April for a bill that mandated TikTok's China-based parent company sell its U.S. operation by Sunday.
That pressure came amid a bipartisan push for the U.S. to ban TikTok altogether unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sold it to an American company. TikTok has faced scrutiny over potential national security risks if used by the Chinese government to influence American users or collect data from the millions of users' devices.
While TikTok was banned as part of a law requiring ByteDance to divest from it starting in January, the app has yet to go dark for more than a day.
On the first day of President Donald Trump's second term, a day after the TikTok ban was set to go into effect, he gave TikTok a 75-day reprieve to find a new owner. Trump has since given the app two additional extensions, the latest of which is set to expire in mid-September.
Any sale of TikTok to an American company to avoid a future ban would need to be approved by both the U.S. and Chinese governments. Complicating any sales earlier this year, though, were the increasing tariffs on Chinese imports that Trump has since partially walked back.
Tammy Baldwin joins bipartisan group calling for crackdown on TikTok, social media apps
The bill is the latest proposed measure focused on what lawmakers and national security officials have described as the mounting threat posed by "technology from foreign adversaries.
© 2025 The Wisconsin State Journal (Madison, Wis.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
