California has become the in style state to ban politically motivated deepfakes amidst originate concern about how the technology could be used to interfere with the 2020 election .
On Thursday , California Governor Gavin Newsom sign theAB 730bill into law , making it illegal to create or distribute deceptively altered videos , audio , or photo of political candidates . Additionally , he signedAB 602 , a broadside that appropriate California residents to take sound action against distributor of deepfake pornographic contentedness which distributes their likeness without getting legal consent to do so .
Anew study on deepfakes released by cybersecurity ship’s company Deeptrace shows that the overpowering absolute majority of deepfake videos online admit nonconsensual porn . concord to the study , 96 percent of deepfakes posted online are sexually explicit , and 99 percent of those TV feature women who cultivate in the entertainment sector . It ’s undeniable that the primary target of weaponized deepfakes are women .
Photo: (AP)
https://twitter.com/embed/status/1181190899583209479
But one of the most - late widely disseminated pull strings videos was n’t a deepfake , it targeted a woman , and it was used for political purposes . In May , adistorted videoof House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that appeared to show her slurring her words went viral , for the most part thanks to President Donald Trump retweeting a variant of the video shared by Fox News . The incident was the most obvious and public display of how doctored videos can be used to misrepresent political opponent , distort narratives , and hack news rhythm .
Now California is providing a path to allow for people to take action against these eccentric of video , which will only get easy to bring forth with quickly developing deepfake engineering and audiovisual editing software .
California assemblyman Marc Berman wrote the political deepfake bill . “ In the context of elections , the power to attribute actor’s line or conduct to a candidate that is false — that never happened — makes deepfake engineering science a brawny and dangerous new putz in the armory of those who want to wage misinformation drive to confuse voters , ” Berman said , in a public statement .
The legal philosophy can only be applied to deepfakes that are distributed 60 days prior to an election . Deepfakes that are clearly marked as fabrication or are satiric in nature are exempt from the law — caveats that seem intended to ensure the law does n’t run afoul of free manner of speaking protections .
Last month , Texas became the first country to criminalize political deepfakes with a law that makes it a misdemeanor to make and partake distorted videos about a political challenger a calendar month before an election .
It ’s a near - certainty that both California and Texas will have a hard time enforcing these natural law between now and the 2020 election , but it ’s a good sign that state legislative assembly are at last consider the dystopian possibility of the proliferation of this technology .
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