Yahoo reported that, with deepfake technology producing realistically modified digital content at a steeply increasing rate, California’s governor Gavin Newsom is taking a series of legal steps to avoid such technology from damaging the state’s political integrity and protect residents from having their faces placed on pornographic content.

According to the post from Yahoo, late last week, Newsom signed a pair of bills into law that makes it illegal to post deepfake videos of candidates running for political office and giving people the right to sue anyone who superimposes their face on pornographic content without consent… The first one would prohibit people from “distributing with actual malice materially deceptive audio or visual media of the candidate with the intent to injure the candidate’s reputation or to deceive a voter into voting for or against the candidate,” unless it’s been specifically stated that the content is manipulated.

“While these measures are expected to reduce the distribution of misinformation about individuals running for office”, Rick Hasen argues that there are serious constitutional questions with the new law notably as related to the first amendment. He contrasts it with his own proposal for regulating certain deep fakes, which he exposes in his upcoming Childress Lecture (being delivered Friday), “Deep Fakes, Bots, and Siloed Justices: American Election Law in a Post-Truth World.”