California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed two bills on Tuesday aimed at banning “deepfakes” — digitally manipulated video or images — of candidates before elections, as well as at prohibiting digital “disinformation” during elections.
The controversial legislation has been described as a direct response to X owner Elon Musk, who shared a deepfake parody of Vice President Kamala Harris, which combined real quotes with a fake but convincing Harris voiceover.
(Breitbart News may be legally prohibited from sharing the video, lest it run afoul of the law — pending inevitable First Amendment challenges.)
The two bills, AB 2655 and AB 2839, are related. The first requires “large online platforms” to “block the posting of materially deceptive content related to elections in California, during specified periods before and after an election.”
It also bars “materially deceptive content,” which is defined as “audio or visual media that is digitally created or modified, and that includes, but is not limited to, deepfakes.” That could, in theory, include a broad range of political speech — such as Kamala Harris’s false claims that former President Donald Trump once praised neo-Nazis, a claim known as the “very fine people hoax.”
The second bill targets deepfakes, which show “[a] candidate for any federal, state, or local elected office in California portrayed as doing or saying something that the candidate did not do or say if the content is reasonably likely to harm the reputation or electoral prospects of a candidate.” There are exceptions for satire, parody, and news reporting, as long as the “deepfake” is accompanied by a disclaimer.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.