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September 19, 2024 - 1:00pm
California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed three bills this week targeting AI misinformation, but critics argue that the legislation will serve as a Trojan horse for censorship.
“I just signed a bill to make this illegal in the state of California,” Newsom posted on social media on Tuesday evening, referencing a satirical video purporting to be a Kamala Harris ad. “You can no longer knowingly distribute an ad or other election communications that contain materially deceptive content — including deepfakes.”
There are already federal laws in place banning the spread of election-related misinformation intended to suppress voting, which have been used in recent years to prosecute Right-wing individuals involved in a robocall scam as well as a man who flippantly claimed in 2016 that Hillary Clinton’s supporters could vote by text. The California laws go further, requiring social media companies to moderate election-related “deepfakes” and take down offending content. Critics say this will force companies to censor aggressively, taking down flagged videos regardless of whether they actually violate the law in order to avoid Government penalties.
One online parody artist has already sued California over the new laws. “Because the bills use undefined and vague statutory language, they grant California broad discretion to determine what constitutes impermissible ‘materially deceptive,’” attorneys in the case argued. “This creates a chilling effect on free speech, particularly for political commentators.”
Their client, Christopher Kohls, created the meme referenced by Gavin Newsom, a satirical Harris ad which included the phrase “I was selected as the ultimate diversity hire […] so if you criticise anything I say you’re both sexist and racist.”
Nathan Leamer, former policy advisor to the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, told UnHerd these new laws present free speech concerns by placing the burden of censorship on social media platforms.“This type of hastily written and flawed bill will only create perverse incentives for platforms to err on the side of caution, censoring and suppressing information, out of concern for being jawboned by the state government,” he told UnHerd. “Policymakers should be looking for tangible examples of harms, not hypotheticals.”
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SubscribeWhat do you mean “risk”? It is blatant, outright censorship. In the United States our First Amendment right to free speech is protected by our Constitution, which also protects our Second Amendment right to protect ourselves from government. Which is, of course, why the Democrats want to do away with both.
About the headline: this is not about “risk.” This is about intent and Gavin means to enforce censorship to the maximum degree he can. Govt people are falling over themselves to define, codify, and proscribe “misinformation.”
Nearly every anti-Trump ad would, if these laws are serious, land the producers in jail. But of course these aren’t serious laws. They are just more slimeball censorship laws that will only be used against prople who don’t like Harris.
I couldn’t read this. The photo made me feel sick.
My thoughts exactly.
If he’s as annoying as he looks, life in Ca. must be grim indeed.
Really?
As a unremarkable-looking person subject to British dentistry and skincare, when I saw that photo, I thought “I wish I looked that good” – although noted the irony of Newsom (and other CA dwellers) complaining about “deepfakes”. Isn’t that what they already are*?
*For UnHerd commenters who are hard of reading, I’m talking about cosmetic enhancements.
Their superficiality is so deep that it makes them fake.
I bet there’s a been a bevy of “misinformation experts” drafting this legislation. You cannot, in 2024 escape hearing about how we citizens need legislation to protect us from a supposed epidemic of ‘fake news’ and ‘misinformation’. I on the other hand, can think of nothing more chillingly Orwellian than the concept of a misinformation expert. Anyone with a reasonable grasp of the interface between human nature and man’s inherent epistemological limitations could not seriously entertain such a notion without choking on their hubris sandwich. We’re talking about a kind of resurgent Maoism here. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/take-me-to-your-experts
Yet it is perfectly okay for political parties to artfully edit video clips of their opponent, taking them wildly out of context, and using these in campaign ads. Hmm.
Good point. This type of crap just ends up being a slippery slope, and more and more things get censored. I live in CA, and Newsom makes me sick.
I hate this sort of thing. They just assume we are all complete morons who can’t tell a “deep fake” from the real thing. Please stop further blunting our critical thinking skills by removing things that the government feels we are too dumb to figure out on our own.
And for the dummies that do believe deep fakes? There will always be morons, and no amount of legislating will change that.
Combine censorship, and prosecutorial discretion, and what do you have?
Whatever you want . . . who’s to say otherwise.
The bill is not about MISinformation, but DISinformation.
Both terms are execerable. Neither term is objective. They are both just cheap veneer to dress up censorship.