Two new California laws crack down on deepfakes in politics and porn, with one giving citizens the right to sue if they are placed in porn without their consent
While some deepfakes are silly and fun, others are misleading and even abusive. Two new California laws aim to put a stop to these more nefarious video forgeries.
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2019 report marks California's first move against synthetic media: two statutes targeting deepfakes in election content and nonconsensual pornography, the latter giving citizens a direct right to sue. It predates the generative-AI boom, so the laws were written for a forgery problem most voters had barely heard of.
Five years on, the same state signed a much broader package when [[a:875443|Newsom signed three election-deepfake laws holding large platforms liable for unremoved content]], and lawmakers nationwide followed the template with bipartisan bills targeting nonconsensual AI porn and fake celebrity endorsements. The through-line from this story to today is clear: California keeps setting the legislative pace.
First-order effects
- Victims of nonconsensual deepfake pornography in California gain a private right of action — they no longer depend on police or prosecutors to pursue creators and distributors in court.
- Political actors spreading deceptive forged video near California elections face statutory liability, giving campaigns and officials a legal tool beyond fact-checking.
Second-order effects
- Other states copy the approach: the corpus shows bipartisan deepfake bills proliferating nationally by 2024, culminating in more than 120 state deepfake laws enacted since 2023.
- Enforcement meets First Amendment friction — the election-focused successor statute AB 2839 was temporarily blocked by a federal judge, showing that the political-deepfake half of these laws courts constitutional pushback even as the porn-victim right to sue endures.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, likeness rights become a formal legal category in the US, enforced state-by-state rather than federally — leaving platforms to arbitrate a patchwork of state definitions of consent and deception.
- Private litigation replaces prosecution as the primary remedy: as San Francisco's city attorney demonstrated by suing to shut down 16 nonconsensual deepfake-porn sites, civil suits against both individuals and site operators are becoming the standard enforcement mechanism.
The trend: Deepfake law is scaling from two experimental California statutes into a national, litigation-driven regime where states legislate faster than federal or platform governance.