Judge John Mendez\u2019s ruling didn\u2019t deny that<\/p>\n
AI deepfakes can poison democracy;<\/p>\n
it declared that California cannot silence them by<\/p>\n
criminalizing speech or forcing platforms to scrub it.<\/p>\n
By striking down both the content-focused ban and<\/p>\n
the takedown mandate as unconstitutional and preempted by Section 230,<\/p>\n
he sided firmly with a long line of cases that protect even disturbing,<\/p>\n
deceptive political expression. The Babylon Bee, X, and<\/p>\n
Rumble emerged as unlikely standard-bearers for that principle.<\/p>\n
The decision leaves California entering its first generative-AI election<\/p>\n
cycle with almost no bespoke guardrails, despite lawmakers\u2019 vivid<\/p>\n
warnings of fake videos, robocalls, and images designed to warp voter behavior.<\/p>\n
The burden now shifts to voters, campaigns, and platforms to build new norms of<\/p>\n
verification and skepticism. Instead of government deciding what is \u201ctrue\u201d<\/p>\n
enough to publish, the ruling forces democracy to confront AI chaos in the open\u2014and survive it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Judge John Mendez\u2019s ruling didn\u2019t deny that AI deepfakes can poison democracy; it declared that California cannot silence them by criminalizing speech or forcing platforms to scrub it. By striking down both the content-focused ban and the takedown mandate as unconstitutional and preempted by Section 230, he sided firmly with a long line of cases…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3133,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_kad_post_transparent":"default","_kad_post_title":"default","_kad_post_layout":"default","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"default","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"default","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"brizy_media":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usanews1.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usanews1.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usanews1.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usanews1.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usanews1.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3132"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/usanews1.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3134,"href":"https:\/\/usanews1.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3132\/revisions\/3134"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usanews1.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usanews1.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usanews1.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usanews1.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}