California Enacts Laws to Fight Election Deepfakes

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed stringent new legislation to combat artificial intelligence deepfakes with political overtones before elections.

Onstage at a San Francisco, California conference, Governor Gavin Newsom signed three measures to combat deepfake electoral content.

It happened just a few weeks after Elon Musk re-posted a parody of a Kamala Harris campaign ad on X, which received millions of views and implied that Harris was a mediocre presidential contender through AI-powered voice manipulation.

In late July, Newsom expressed Musk’s post when he promised to sign a bill outlawing the practice “in a matter of weeks.”

With immediate effect, the new law, AB 2839, forbids individuals and organizations from intentionally disseminating election deepfakes and other forms of “materially deceptive content.”

The regulations only forbid disseminating a candidate’s substantially misleading audio or video materials sixty days before an election. The new law has extended the ban to 120 days before an election in California and, in certain situations, 60 days following the election.

On the same day, Newsom signed two other legislation that will go into effect in January but are intended to combat political AI deepfakes.

A law known as AB 2355 mandates that political commercials produced or significantly modified using artificial intelligence (AI) bear labeling.

The other, AB 2655, mandates that social media companies like Facebook and X, which have over a million users in California, remove misleading content about elections during designated times.

Additionally, it will hold platforms accountable if they don’t take down content within 72 hours of a user reporting it.

The governor reportedly signed the three laws—exclusive to California—during a fireside talk with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at the Dreamforce convention in San Francisco.

The New York Times was informed by Ilana Beller, the organizing manager of Public Citizen’s democracy team, that the proposed measure is “very different from other bills that have been put forth.”

On September 17, Newsom also signed two further laws, AB 1836 and AB 2602, which seek to provide performers with more control over the use of their digital likenesses.

Posting on July 26, the spoof Harris campaign ad has received 25.4 million views on X alone and is still accessible on the platform.

Musk then justified, making fun of Newsom, his retweet of the original post at the time:

“I checked with renowned world authority, Professor Suggon Deeznutz, and he said parody is legal in America”