Gov. Newsom Attacks Free Speech

Gov. Gavin Newsom should have known this would happen. After he signed three new laws regulating political ads and parodies produced by artificial intelligence, the Babylon Bee parody site produced one flouting the law and mocking him. It uses what’s called a “deepfake” of his voice praising such “achievements” as people leaving the state and the homeless crisis.

“On my watch, the cost of living and homelessness have skyrocketed,” you can hear in Newsom’s voice. “Schools are failing.” And so on.

Proponents of such laws believe voters aren’t smart enough to engage with such content and must be protected from unfair speech by the government. But such mockery goes back to the earliest days of the republic, when partisans of President John Adams and challenger Thomas Jefferson threw mud at the opposition with abandon. Jefferson was attacked by the president of Yale, for example, on the grounds that if he won, “we would see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution.”

Unfair? Sure. Misleading? Sure. But this is America, where freedom of speech is constitutionally protected. In time, the best ideas eventually prevail.

Two of the bills signed by Newsom are clear attacks on freedom of speech and expression.

Satires and parodies are great fun and fair.

Deepfakes are not.

I don’t know how to draw the line, but until fairly recently, technological limits made it fairly obvious to reasonably intelligent viewers what was a spoof vs. what was real. Very polished fakes that could fool competent observers were theoretically possible, but they would have been expensive and time consuming to make. I can’t think of a good example in the context of a political campaign. The more common problem (and still a problem today) has always been highly selective editing and framing, which can be so deceptive that it is essentially fraudulent.

Now the technology permits the creation of highly sophisticated deepfakes quickly and at low cost. I don’t know how to control it, and I don’t know if there is any merit whatsoever to what California has enacted. I certainly don’t trust the California dems to do it right. But the problem is real. We would be howling if the shoe was on the other foot. I’m actually a bit surprised that we never saw Stormi Daniels’ supposed homemade sex tapes with Donald Trump, supposedly shot on her iPhone. We’re an inch away from this kind of thing becoming the norm in political campaigns.

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