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
nearly all deepfakes are being made for porn Cara Curtis / The Next Web : California makes deepfakes illegal to curb revenge porn and doctored political videos Jennings Brown / Gizmodo : California Bans Deepfakes in Porn and Politics
Context & Ripple Effects
These two statutes are the opening move in what has become a five-year legal campaign against synthetic media: California's first laws targeting non-consensual deepfake porn and doctored political videos, signed when nearly all deepfakes were still being made for pornography. The private right of action for porn victims is the piece with legs — it turns every victim into a potential plaintiff rather than waiting on prosecutors.
The arc since then validates the template. Gov. Newsom built on it in September 2024 with three election-deepfake laws that add platform liability for ignoring user reports, San Francisco's city attorney went after the creation tools themselves with a lawsuit against 16 deepfake-porn sites, and by 2025 states had enacted more than 120 deepfake-related laws nationwide. The first-generation statutes also supplied the language that is now being stress-tested in court.
First-order effects
- Victims of non-consensual deepfake pornography gain a civil claim they can file themselves — no longer dependent on criminal prosecutors or platform takedown goodwill.
- Political actors distributing materially doctored videos of candidates near elections face a new prohibition, giving California campaigns and media outlets a legal line between satire and deception.
Second-order effects
- Platforms and sites hosting deepfake content become the enforcement bottleneck: once victims can sue creators directly, demand shifts toward detection and removal services, and later laws extend liability to platforms that ignore reports.
- Other legislatures treat California's text as a copyable template — the bipartisan bills moving through statehouses in 2024 target the same two categories, non-consensual porn and fake endorsements, that these 2019 statutes defined.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, deepfake regulation consolidates into a state-led patchwork with private lawsuits doing most of the enforcement — a structure already showing strain where a judge temporarily blocked enforcement of California's AB 2839 election law on First Amendment grounds.
- The endgame is a split system for synthetic media: election deepfakes policed through speech-contested statutes and litigation, while non-consensual porn moves toward the same victim-empowerment model these laws pioneered — with the balance still unsettled.
The trend: Deepfake law is expanding from California's 2019 two-statute start into a national, largely state-driven regime that pairs criminal bans with private rights of action and increasingly pushes enforcement onto platforms.