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Are Satirical Deepfake Videos Now a Crime in California?
California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed legislation making it illegal to “with malice, knowingly distribute an advertisement or other election communication containing materially deceptive content,” 120 days before an election and 60 days after. The new law generally applies to AI images and deepfake videos of politicians and treads closely, if not openly, to violating the constitutional protections for free speech and satire. As a result, The Babylon Bee has challenged the new law with, of course, a hilarious and satirical deepfake video of the perfectly coifed governor (that clearly and accurately describes his term in office).
More on the new law from Newsom’s office:
AB 2655 by Assemblymember Marc Berman (D-Menlo Park) requires large online platforms to remove or label deceptive and digitally altered or created content related to elections during specified periods, and requires them to provide mechanisms to report such content. It also authorizes candidates, elected officials, elections officials, the Attorney General, and a district attorney or city attorney to seek injunctive relief against a large online platform for noncompliance with the act.
“AI-generated deepfakes pose a clear and present risk to our elections and our democracy. AB 2655 is a first-in-the-nation solution to this growing threat, and I am grateful to Governor Newsom for signing it. Advances in AI over the last few years make it easy to generate hyper-realistic yet completely fake election-related deepfakes, but AB 2655 will ensure that online platforms minimize their impact. The new law is a win for California’s voters, and for our democracy,” said Assemblymember Berman.
…and…(emphasis mine)
AB 2839, an urgency measure by Assemblymember Gail Pellerin (D-Santa Cruz), expands the timeframe in which a committee or other entity is prohibited from knowingly distributing an advertisement or other election material containing deceptive AI-generated or manipulated content. The bill also expands the scope of existing law to prohibit materially deceptive content of elected officials, candidates, elections officials and others, authorizing them to file a civil action to enjoin the distribution of such material.
Democrats in Pennsylvania should be relieved that their state does not have a similar law, because warrants would certainly be issued for the Democrat operatives who put up bus stop signs deceptively claiming that the Philadelphia Eagles organization had endorsed Kamala Harris.
On a related note…does the omission of a candidate’s entire quotation on a given subject, in other words, manipulating a candidate’s actual content…with malice…fall under this new law? Haven’t Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, Joe Biden, and a number of other Democrat lawmakers and operatives continued to knowingly (and “with malice”) distribute election communication containing materially deceptive content about Donald Trump? Haven’t they continued to perpetuate knowingly false information that has been repeatedly debunked – even by leftist media fact-checkers like Snopes?
Don’t they continue to spread blatant falsehoods about statements and declarations that Trump has purportedly made, including the “Fine People” hoax, the “Bloodbath” smear, the “Dictator on Day One” sarcastic remark, the “Suckers and Losers” hoax, and many other blatant falsehoods – and that he will incarcerate his political enemies (irony alert) if elected? Sounds a smidge deceptive and malicious to me.
Of course, the new California law, written by Democrats in a Democrat super-majority legislature in Sacramento and signed by a Democrat governor with a long list of political career failures (see the Babylon Bee video) will never be directed to arrest fellow Democrat politicians, surrogates, supporters or other commentators who continue to perpetuate these many hoaxes and lies.
The new law is clearly designed to put the fear of arrest, prosecution, and incarceration into anyone critical, even through satire, of Democrat politicians seeking election — especially those Democrats who continue to blatantly lie — of which there are so many that one loses count.
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Perhaps. But only until the Supreme Court strikes down the law on 1A grounds.
They won’t do it until there’s a test case that gets elevated to the Supreme Court. A good deal of what the Babylon Bee produces could be worthy candidates.
California is getting to be where it’ll be easier to list what’s NOT illegal.
Be interesting trying to extradite someone from Texas to California 0n this charge. Hell, to arrest someone in Texas.
Maybe UK will do it first.
California is right on track for their Totalitarian ideal.
How are the Dems gonna campaign without deceptive advertising? Hmmm?
About time.
Humor is a form of rape.
Satire is the subtle way that white people show off their ownership of all “truth” by pretending to mock it.
Information is too important to be owned, used, produced, or repeated by unqualified persons. Some kind of licensing is obviously needed.
Using facts to advance a false ideology is far worse than using a non-fact to encapsulate a scientifically verified truth. That is the kind of distinction that only qualified, licensed persons can and should make.
You have always loved Gavin Newsome. California is love.
Prior AB 730:
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB730
Just signed:
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240AB2655
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240AB2355
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240AB2839
The malice requirement is going to be abused.
In terms of challenges, X/Twitter may be in position to do a pre-enforcement challenge.
One issue is that many people who argue that states (FL, TX, etc.) can’t regulate social media are likely to favor this.
YouTube VIDEO REMOVED.
A search on YouTube yields hundreds of videos of Kamala Harris and other Democrats lying about Trump’s purported embrace of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Hardly any at all that counters these false narratives. I’m sure the Democrats in Sacramento including Gavin Newsom are incensed about all this false information propagating on YouTube. Ahem.
The video I initially included in this comment was from a YouTuber who posts videos about RV-ing and the RV community. He posted a video of Brett Baier’s interview yesterday with a spokesman from the Heritage Foundation who clearly and emphatically stated that Kamala Harris was a liar in her claims that Project 2025 advocated for a nationwide abortion ban.
Regrettably the YouTuber removed the video because one of his subscribers objected to seeing a political video on his channel…never mind what the possible repercussions would be for the RV community from a Harris-Walz administration that will no doubt continue to attack and restrict the oil industry, push gas prices higher, and push for EV mandates.
Well, nonconsensual humor, anyway.
And that sounds absurd, until you realize that there’s a pretty big constituency that objects to you referring to them by what they consider to be the “wrong” pronoun — this despite the fact that they’re likely being referred to in the third person and aren’t present to hear the offense.
I never consented to him using a pronoun other than “zer” when referring to zme.
It’s simple, really. They already do illegal stuff all the time, they’re just never charged/prosecuted.
Zer can take a hike back to wherever they speak zer’s language.
I was going to go with, “how dare zer refer to [whatever] as ‘him!'”
Please share this video as much as possible.
Agreed.
Prosecutorial discretion. All the prosecutors are Democrats.
Yep, #14.
Suit against Newsom’s ban:
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69172215/kohls-v-bonta/
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/18/california-deepfake-ban-lawsuit-harris-00179975
Lawsuit Filed
Read more at the link.
Enjoined except as to ban on audio-only media:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.caed.453046/gov.uscourts.caed.453046.14.0.pdf
Just how ironic is it that Calif’s Gov Newsom is behind the legislation titled “Defending Democracy from Deepfake Deception Act.”
The real deep fake deceptions involve how our entire state and its agencies now have concerns with how parents deal with the five year old little boy’s obsession with wearing a necklace from mom’s costume jewelry box, with eliminating the “non-native” owls from our forests, and with a tax agency that makes demands on citizens via letters, but neither answers letters or answers phone calls that are made.
That we citizens were locked down, had our businesses shuttered and eventually had to submit to being Cov-vaxxed, while people not here legally received $ 500 a month from the state of Calif to offset the hardships that Newsom had imposed. (Illegal aliens also did not have to get vaxxed.)
All we citizens got from the governor during the COVID era was the perky slogan that “we are in this together!”
Newsom is a Deepfake Deception. The only reason we have Kamala as the Dem candidate is that Newsom knows it is wiser to wait til 2028, as the only way that any Dem candidate can win the Oval Office this November is if the Dems can manage to steal this second re-election campaign of Donald Trump.
UPDATE: Deep Fake Law Struck Down
That’s a relief. Of course possibly to get even with this judge, it has now been made illegal to have polling place officials ask an individual for any type of ID when they go in to vote.
If federal law says/interprets that only legal citizens can vote, at least in federal elections, then it would seem appropriate that any state which doesn’t require that, doesn’t get their votes counted. i.e., the People’s Republic of California loses ALL of their Electoral College votes.