X Sues to Block California Law Cracking Down on Election Deepfakes

Elon Musk’s X is suing to block a new California law aimed at cracking down on deepfakes around election time, claiming it violates the First Amendment.

The Defending Democracy From Deepfake Deception Act of 2024, or AB 2655, looks to block “inauthentic, fake, or false” deepfake content 120 days before or after an election in California. Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed the bill in September, saying it’s “critical that we ensure AI is not deployed to undermine the public’s trust through disinformation – especially in today’s fraught political climate.”

The law, set to go into effect next year, also gives election officials and candidates the power to sue in response to misleading election deepfakes. 

As Bloomberg reports, X’s complaint alleges that the law will “result in the censorship of wide swaths of valuable political speech” and would also violate the First Amendment. It would replace “the judgments of covered platforms about what content belongs on their platforms with the judgments of the state” and “incentivize online platforms to “err on the side of removing and/or labeling any content that presents even a close call” when it comes to being “materially deceptive.”

In September, Musk said on X that Newsom had “signed a LAW to make parody illegal.” But the bill text specifies: “The bill would also exempt content that is satire or parody.”

In July, Musk reposted a video featuring a deepfake of Vice President Kamala Harris in which she called President Biden senile, said she doesn’t “know the first thing about running the country,” and referred to herself as the “ultimate diversity hire.”

At the time, Gov. Newsom condemned the video and pledged to crack down on politically focused deepfakes being shared on social media. Musk’s response? “I checked with renowned world authority, Professor Suggon Deeznutz, and he said parody is legal in America.” Newsom signed AB2655 several weeks later.

OpenAI recently said it rejected over 250,000 requests to generate Dall-E images of candidates in the month before the US presidential election, as part of its wider campaign to stop election interference. Midjourney, another popular AI image generator, similarly banned images of presidential candidates ahead of the 2024 elections, highlighting moderation difficulties.

X’s latest chatbot for premium users, Grok-2, adopted a different approach. It allowed people to generate images of political figures, producing such bizarre images as Donald Trump holding Vice President Kamala Harris’s pregnant belly.

About Will McCurdy

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I’m a reporter covering weekend news. Before joining PCMag in 2024, I picked up bylines in BBC News, The Guardian, The Times of London, The Daily Beast, Vice, Slate, Fast Company, The Evening Standard, The i, TechRadar, and Decrypt Media.

I’ve been a PC gamer since you had to install games from multiple CD-ROMs by hand. As a reporter, I’m passionate about the intersection of tech and human lives. I’ve covered everything from crypto scandals to the art world, as well as conspiracy theories, UK politics, and Russia and foreign affairs.

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