“Shame on us if we wait until 2021 to deal
with this,” Berman told members of the
Senate Elections and Constitutional
Amendments Committee.
But Berman’s proposal has met with opposition
from civil liberties groups, newspapers and
broadcasters that argue the bill would prove
difficult to enforce while undermining the
freedom of speech.
In a letter to the committee, the California News
Publishers Association said the bill is too broad,
applying to material that is not false and does
not cause any harm.
“AB 730 only requires that the manipulated
work be distributed with the intent that it
cause harm to the candidate’s reputation or
deceive voters, it does not require that any
actual harm occur,” the organization said.
“Likewise, with respect to the issue of harming
a candidate’s reputation, the bill doesn’t require
that the distributed work actually convey a
false message, so long as the work has been
somehow manipulated to appear authentic.”
Disclosure rules are a half measure, said Danielle
Keats Citron, a professor at Boston University
who has studied the issue of deep fakes.
“Disclosure may be ineffective in part because
people tend to credit video and audio as true
as a visceral matter especially if it is salacious or
accords with their views,” she said.
Ultimately, she added, a disclaimer may not be
seen by the very people it is meant to inform.
Going further and writing laws to ban these
sorts of videos altogether would likely run into
constitutional challenges, experts add.