Unscrupulous political agents are spreading disinformation. This bill will help stop them.
By Nathan Johnson | Dallas News
Seeing is believing. Well, not always. It’s OK — desirable, even — to be fooled by digital images when we watch movies. It’s not OK when we’re deciding how to vote in elections.
As much as we tend to think election outcomes are the foregone conclusions of partisan map drawing, there still are contests in which people struggle to make up their minds about candidates; sometimes in a primary election, sometimes in a general election.
Seeing is believing. Well, not always. It’s OK — desirable, even — to be fooled by digital images when we watch movies. It’s not OK when we’re deciding how to vote in elections.
As much as we tend to think election outcomes are the foregone conclusions of partisan map drawing, there still are contests in which people struggle to make up their minds about candidates; sometimes in a primary election, sometimes in a general election.
The technology for digitally altering images and creating fake videos gets more powerful every day. It gives election saboteurs the ability to make us think and feel things that aren’t real, and to vote accordingly. It’s a growing threat to the integrity of our elections and our democratic institutions.
After all the acrimony over election laws during the past few years, addressing the threat of manipulating voters through digital alteration of images is neither controversial nor partisan.
The threat applies without regard to state boundaries, so you’d think the federal government would have already acted to safeguard the electoral process against manipulation by digital hacks. Alas, this is yet another area where Congress hasn’t performed its duty, and responsible action falls to the states.
In 2019, Texas passed the nation’s first law prohibiting “deep fake videos,” those produced using artificial intelligence, made with the intent to deceive people and influence the outcome of an election.
The 2019 law did not, however, address a simpler manipulation tool — altered still images. This session, I filed Senate Bill 1044 to expand the reach of the 2019 “deep fake” law to include digitally altered images: photos manipulated to change in a realistic way how someone looks, or to show them doing something they didn’t actually do, with the intent to deceive people and influence the outcome of an election.
Any effort to place boundaries on verbal or visual communications inevitably runs into concerns about preserving rights of free expression. Indeed, when it comes to politics, we seem to have an attitude of anything goes regarding criticizing, characterizing and caricaturing candidates and elected officials.
But this isn’t about free speech or damage to reputation or hurt feelings. It’s about protecting voters and the electoral process from malicious manipulation. And it’s not that hard. The bill doesn’t regulate caricatures, cartoons, satire or superficial changes; it applies to only deliberate attempts to trick us.
We needn’t sacrifice free expression to protect the electoral process from deliberate sabotage. And we should not permit ourselves to be played by those who would gain power through deceit. New digital tools require new rules. Texas can and should continue its lead over other states in protecting the integrity of elections from digital sabotage. After all, this isn’t a movie.
Nathan Johnson is a Democrat representing Dallas in the Texas Senate. He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.