Stuart Thompson

California will now require social media companies to moderate the spread of election-related impersonations powered by artificial intelligence, known as “deepfakes,” after Gov Gavin Newsom (D-CA) signed three new laws on the subject on September 17. The three laws, including a first-of-its-kind law that imposes a new requirement on social media platforms, largely deal with banning or labeling deepfakes. Only one of the laws will

The internet was spewing racist and sexist attacks long before Vice President Kamala Harris (D-CA) began her presidential campaign, including when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton sought the job. Since the last major election, however, it has become even more noxious—and more central to American politics. In 2008, then-Sen Obama (D-IL) Obama faced an ecosystem in which Facebook had millions of users, not billions, and the iPhone was just a year old. In 2016, Clinton’s campaign monitored a handful of social media platforms, not dozens.

Granular surveillance is still new. But some experts argue the window to define our cultural values around tracking citizens may be closing. In the United States, and across the world, any protester who brings a phone to a public demonstration is tracked and that person’s presence at the event is duly recorded in commercial datasets. At the same time, political parties are beginning to collect and purchase phone location for voter persuasion.

The Times Privacy Project obtained a dataset with more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million people in this country.