Gavin Newsom signs a bill making parodies of Democrats illegal.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) -- California now has some of the toughest laws in the United States to crack down on election deepfakes ahead of the 2024 election after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed three landmark proposals this week at an artificial intelligence conference in San Francisco.

The state could be among the first to test out such legislation, which bans the use of AI to create and circulate false images and videos in political ads close to Election Day.

But now, two of the three laws, including one that was designed to curb the practice in the 2024 election, are being challenged in court through a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Sacramento.

Those include one that takes effect immediately that allows any individual to sue for damages over election deepfakes, while the other requires large online platforms, like X, to remove the deceptive material starting next year.

The lawsuit, filed by a person who created parody videos featuring altered audios of Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, says the laws censor free speech and allow anybody to take legal action over content they dislike. At least one of his videos was shared by Elon Musk, owner of the social media platform X, which then prompted Newsom to vow to ban such content on a post on X.

The governor's office said the law doesn't ban satire and parody content. Instead, it requires the disclosure of the use of AI to be displayed within the altered videos or images.

"It's unclear why this conservative activist is suing California," Newsom spokesperson Izzy Gardon said in a statement. "This new disclosure law for election misinformation isn't any more onerous than laws already passed in other states, including Alabama."

Below, the Kamala Harris obvious parody that so upset Gavin Newsom, and then a parody noting, accurately, that Gavin Newsom has promoted every piece of Regime Disinformation from the past ten years and also is seriously gay.

That first parody shows why Newsom's law is unworkable: It threads obvious AI deepfake parody with real video. Newsom wants someone to mark this as all deepfake, which then, conveniently for him, wrongly tells people that the real video is also fake.

Meanwhile, Mike Benz explains that the US Deep State really got into the censorship business when voters in the US and around the world cast Wrongvotes and needed to have their wrongthoughts coercively corrected by the Marxist Left.

Victoria Taft:

"The public is funding its silencing."

The censorship mechanisms we now see on a daily basis in our Google searches, wildly one-sided "news" coverage, and the consolidation of speech codes into full-fledged and sometimes violent censorship on campuses across the nation are the outgrowth of U.S. State Department censorship programs enacted in 2016 after a new bubble of worldwide populism erupted. It marked the point when all of the mechanisms the U.S. employed against our enemies were turned on the American people.

Benz told podcaster Shawn Ryan (see video below) that the domestic censorship campaign was constructed when the government censorship crowd decided that free people had chosen poorly with their votes.

The advent of populism really started in 2016 with the events of the Philippines election, the events of Brexit, the events of Donald Trump's election, followed in short succession by [Jair] Bolsonaro in Brazil, [Matteo] Salvini in Italy, Marine Le Pen's rise in France, Vox Party's rise in Spain, AFDs rise in Germany.

Suddenly the people had to be stopped and wrong-think had to be corrected -- and the U.S. State Department, CIA, and other alphabet agencies specializing in disinformation were put into the service of changing the minds of the American and other western people.

Benz has been boldly telling the story about this censorship campaign at his Foundation for Freedom. He's been featured on many right-leaning programs, mainly because the right is currently the victim of the these far-reaching speech attacks. It's similar to the efforts the FBI made with its COINTELPRO spying and worse on America's far left in the 1970s.

...

The Censorship Industrial Complex is now beginning to get baked into the university system for those who want to be diplomats and spooks.

If you wanted to work you know at the the heart of the action a generation ago you'd go to Georgetown and you would study political science or international relations.

[...] Well with this new advent of disinformation studies and it's folded under so many different programs it'll make your head spin the communications departments have this the Applied Physics departments have this for the AI censorship soft software component. The sociology departments have this, the psychology departments have this, the computer science partner programs at universities have this, the Linguistics programs have this.

This broad field of disinformation studies is now an advanced track golden ticket to be at the heart of the action in terms of high level high impact foreign policy blob positions because it doesn't just put you at the heart of Washington and in its own secular interest it puts you right at the heart of a big government, big business, and big Tech.

More at the link.