U.S. District Judge John A. Mendez said artificial intelligence and deepfakes pose significant risks, but he ruled that the law likely violates the First Amendment.

“Most of AB 2839 acts as a hammer instead of a scalpel, serving as a blunt tool that hinders humorous expression and unconstitutionally stifles the free and unfettered exchange of ideas which is so vital to American democratic debate,” Mendez wrote.

The law took effect immediately after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it last month. The Democrat signed two other bills at the time aimed at cracking down on the use of artificial intelligence to create false images or videos in political ads ahead of the 2024 election. They are among the toughest laws of their kind in the nation.

Izzy Gardon, a spokesperson for Newsom, said the laws protect democracy and preserve free speech.

“We’re confident the courts will uphold the state’s ability to regulate these types of dangerous and misleading deepfakes,” he said in a statement. “Satire remains alive and well in California — even for those who miss the punchline.”

But a lawyer representing YouTuber Christopher Kohls, who sued state officials over the law, called the ruling “straightforward.”

“We are gratified that the district court agreed with our analysis that new technologies do not change the principles behind First Amendment protections,” attorney Theodore Frank said.

The law was also unpopular among First Amendment experts, who urged Newsom last month to veto the measure. They argued that the law is unconstitutional and a government overreach.

“If something is truly defamatory, there’s a whole body of law and established legal standards for how to prove a claim for defamation consistent with the First Amendment,” David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, said in an interview in September. “The government is not free to create new categories of speech outside the First Amendment.”

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Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed Senate Bill 976 by state Sen. Nancy Skinner, which prohibits online platforms from knowingly providing an addictive feed to minors without parental consent. The law also stops social media platforms from sending notifications to minors during school hours and late at night — from midnight to 6 a.m. — while they sleep.

By Jan. 1, 2027, social media companies will have an obligation to know the age of their users and implement the requirements under SB 976, making children much safer on social media.

This law will save countless lives here in California, like our eternally 16-year-old son Sammy, who had a drug dealer driven to him by the algorithms on Snapchat, delivering a lethal dose of fentanyl to him like a pizza, after we were asleep. This law will help stop dangerous content from invading our homes through our children’s devices, help our kids pay better attention in school and get more sleep at night.

Although, like California’s Age-Appropriate Design Code Act passed two years ago, SB 976 will surely be challenged by the powerful lobbying groups funded by tech companies. It could be tied up in court for years.

Challenges to the law will likely be along the lines of a First Amendment violation or the oft-mentioned Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which essentially treats the internet like a blackboard. You can’t sue a blackboard for what someone writes on it, but the internet is far from whatever blackboard it may have resembled in 1996.

A recent ruling in the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals determined that artificial intelligence and the algorithms they direct are not human speech and therefore not protected by the Constitution. It’s time for Congress to amend Section 230 and treat the social media industry like any other industry in our country, allowing parents like me to sue for negligence when our children die with the help of repeated social media messages inducing harm or pushing them toward illegal activities.

Harms such as suicide baiting, human trafficking, dangerous challenges like the “choking game,” and drug and firearm sales to minors will be minimized on social media thanks to SB 976, ultimately making California safer for our youth.

Its necessary sister bill, Assembly Bill 3216, authored by Assemblymember Josh Hoover and three others, was also just signed by our governor. School districts will be required to adopt a policy to limit or ban phones on school campuses by July 1, 2026, except in emergencies or with teacher permission as part of a lesson plan.

Smartphones turn into an addiction for many children. They check them incessantly, fidgeting with them in class when the teachers aren’t looking and easily miss important information. Grades may even improve if attention spans can return to normal.

Taken altogether, we can hope to see students more focused at school, learning more and feeling less anxious.

California has long been a leader in technology but that also makes it home to companies that helped create these dangers. Now the state can lead the way in cleaning up the mess we’ve made, helping keep other families from feeling the endless sorrow ours feels from the loss of our son.

Let’s hope these protections catch on around the country. Hopefully, as we say here: As California goes, so goes the nation.

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SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA — California’s representatives serving in the U.S House appear nearly united in response to the wave of protests at U.S. college campuses — including in Riverside County — that have erupted amid Israel’s actions in Gaza.

In a bipartisan move Wednesday, Riverside County’s Congressional members, along with their colleagues in California and across the nation, passed H.R. 6090, otherwise known as the Antisemitism Awareness Act.

Advocates say the legislation would empower the federal government to crack down on current campus protests by creating “a clear definition of antisemitism” that encompasses threats against Jewish people and certain criticisms of Israel. If it becomes law, the Education Department could use it to cut off funding to colleges that, for example, allow protests like those happening today.

First Amendment advocates, however, say the legislation is dangerous in that it would undo longstanding rights.

In a released statement Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union said H.R. 6090 “threatens to censor political speech critical of Israel on college campuses under the guise of addressing antisemitism.”

Christopher Anders, director of ACLU’s Democracy and Technology Policy Division, said, “Addressing rising antisemitism is critically important, but sacrificing American’s free speech rights is not the way to solve that problem. This bill would throw the full weight of the federal government behind an effort to stifle criticism of Israel and risks politicizing the enforcement of federal civil rights statutes precisely when their robust protections are most needed. The Senate must block this bill that undermines First Amendment protections before it’s too late.”

California has 52 House seats, with one vacancy. During Wednesday’s vote, 27 Golden State Democrats and 11 Republicans voted in favor of H.R. 6090. Eleven California Democrats cast no votes and two did not weigh in. With the exception of Mark Takano (D-39), all Riverside County representatives were in favor. Nationally, the bill was approved by a vote of 320-91, with a majority of Democrats — 133 — joining Republicans.

Congressman Darrell Issa (R-48) represents a large swath of Southwest Riverside County, as well as central and eastern parts of San Diego County. He released a statement following his yes vote. It read, in part, ” … after witnessing for more than six months a widespread and growing tide of antisemitism in America — much of it centered on the campuses of our colleges and universities – a bipartisan supermajority of the Congress took appropriate action.”

Republican Congressman Ken Calvert represents District 41, which stretches from Lake Elsinore to part of the Coachella Valley. After his yes vote, he posted a statement on X.

“I just joined a bipartisan majority of the House of Representatives in passing the Antisemitism Awareness Act on the first day of Jewish American Heritage Month. This bill reinforces Civil Rights Act protections for Jewish students who are subjected to antisemitism,” he wrote.

But in nearby San Diego, Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-51), who is Jewish, cast a no vote. In a released statement, she expressed deep concern about rising antisemitism but said H.R. 6090 is not the answer:

It’s unclear what the prospects are for the Antisemitism Awareness Act in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

As Washington debates the legislation, campus protests continue in California. Students at UC Riverside established a campus encampment Monday to protest Israel’s actions in Gaza. The students are calling for the school to end “all investments and endowments” benefiting the Jewish state.

“We are joining the student movement, the student Intifada,” a spokesperson for Students for Justice in Palestine, UCR chapter, told City News Service. “We are not leaving this encampment day and night until the university complies and meets with us to discuss our demands.”

There have been no reports of violence at UCR amid the protest, unlike others in the Golden State. A nine-hour standoff came to a tense and chaotic end at UCLA when police in riot gear breached and dismantled a pro-Palestine encampment at the school early Thursday, terminating a weeklong protest and taking over 100 into custody.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump’s legal team is characterizing his indictment in the special counsel’s 2020 election interference investigation as an attack on the former president’s right to free speech. But the case is not merely about Trump’s lies but also about the efforts he took to subvert the election, prosecutors say.

The early contours of a potential legal and political defense began to emerge in the hours after the charges were unsealed, with defense lawyer John Lauro accusing the Justice Department of having “criminalized” the First Amendment and asserting that his client had relied on the advice of attorneys around him in 2020. He also indicated he would look to slow the case down despite prosecutors’ pledge of a speedy trial.

But experts say there’s little legal merit to Trump’s First Amendment claims, particularly given the breadth of steps taken by Trump and his allies that prosecutors say transformed mere speech into action in a failed bid to undo the election. Those efforts, prosecutors wrote in the indictment, amounted to a disruption of a “bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election.”

“If all that this was about was lies or the alleged lies of President Trump, then he’d have a pretty good legal defense based on the First Amendment,” said Floyd Abrams, a longtime First Amendment attorney. “But the theory of the indictment is that the speech of the president and the falsehoods of the president were part of a general effort to steal the election.”

Lauro said Tuesday night in an interview with CNN that the indictment is an attack on “free speech and political advocacy.”

“And there’s nothing that’s more protected under the First Amendment than political speech,” he said.

The First Amendment does indeed give wide berth for all manner of speech, and it’s well established that lying to the public isn’t itself a crime. Special counsel Jack Smith and his team of prosecutors seemed to have anticipated the First Amendment line of defense, conceding head-on in their indictment that Trump had the right to falsely claim that fraud had cost him the election and to legally challenge the results.

But they also said the conduct of Trump and six co-conspirators he’s alleged to have plotted with went far beyond speech.

“Saying a statement in isolation is one thing. But when you say it to another person and the two of you speak in a way and exchange information in a way that leads to action — that you want to take action to do something with that speech — then arguably it becomes unprotected,” said Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at George Washington University.

Those actions include enlisting slates of fake electors in seven battleground states won by Democrat Joe Biden to sign false certificates representing themselves as legitimate electors; trying to use the investigative power of the Justice Department to launch sham election fraud probes; and badgering his vice president, Mike Pence, to disrupt the ceremonial counting of electoral votes before Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.

That process was indeed disrupted when rioters fueled by Trump’s baseless claims of a stolen election stormed the U.S. Capitol in a violent and chaotic clash with police.

“Insofar as he’s giving instructions, and planning to do things that are themselves illegal and involve action, like the signing of false certificates and so forth, that’s not a very good defense,” said Michael Dorf, a constitutional law expert at Cornell Law School.

Trump’s attorney has also suggested that his defense may at least partly focus on the idea that Trump was acting in good faith because he truly believed his bogus election fraud claims. But the indictment is careful to show how Trump was repeatedly told by people close to him that there was no truth to his claims and that his efforts to undermine the election were misguided.

And some of the comments detailed in the indictment suggest that Trump knew he had lost and that his actions were wrong. In one encounter days before the riot, Trump told Pence he was “too honest” after the vice president said he didn’t have the authority to reject electoral votes, the indictment says.

“I can imagine that prosecutors will use that line over and over and over in the trial, in their opening statement and closing argument, to show that he really didn’t believe the things he was saying,” said Brandon Fox, a former federal prosecutor who now works as a defense attorney.

Another challenge for Trump’s defense is that many of the witnesses he would want to call to the stand to say that they told Trump there was election fraud are co-conspirators who will likely be reluctant to testify.

“Typically in federal prosecutions, those unnamed co-conspirators are not that thrilled about testifying for the defense because they are worried about being charged in the future,” Fox said.

The legal proceedings will be presided over by U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, an appointee of President Barack Obama who has stood out as one of the toughest punishers of rioters. She has also ruled against Trump before, refusing in November 2021 to block the release of documents to the House’s Jan. 6 committee by asserting executive privilege.

No matter the legal viability of the First Amendment arguments, Chutkan is nonetheless expected to let the defense lawyers raise those kinds of arguments and let a jury decide the line between permissible speech and illegal action, said John Fishwick, a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia.

“The worry for a judge will be, ‘Well, if I don’t let this evidence come in, if I don’t let the present former president raise the defense of (the) First Amendment and he’s found guilty, then there’s the risk of another trial,’” Fishwick said.

“So a smart judge,” he added, “is always going to err on giving the defense as many breaks as that judge deems reasonable.”

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