Minnesota makes an election deep fake a crime
The governor of Minnesota signed HF 1370 on 26 May 2023, and on 1 August section 609.771 of the state criminal code took effect. It punishes disseminating a deep fake of a person without their consent, within 90 days before an election and with intent to injure a candidate or influence a result. The penalty runs in three tiers: up to 90 days and 1,000 dollars in the ordinary case, up to 364 days and 3,000 where the intent is violence, and up to five years and 10,000 for a repeat within five years.
Why it matters
What matters is not that this is the first such law, because it is not. What matters is that a state first attached to an election deep fake a penalty that escalates with repetition as far as five years, and gave the right to seek an injunction not only to prosecutors but to the depicted person and to a candidate likely to be injured.
The act is Chapter 58 of the 2023 session laws; the same act creates a civil cause of action and a separate crime for intimate deep fakes. Subdivision 4 gives injunctive relief to the attorney general, a county or city attorney, the depicted individual and a candidate. The first such law was Texas's. Subsection (d) of section 255.004 of the Texas Election Code, added by SB 751 and effective 1 September 2019, makes creating a deep fake video and distributing it within 30 days of an election a Class A misdemeanour. The report this record was built from called the Minnesota law the first in the United States; the Texas text contradicts that. What the record does not claim. The forfeiture of office often attributed to this law is not in the 2023 text: it arrived in 2024, together with a change of the window from 90 days before an election to a count from the opening of absentee voting. The 2023 edition, the one that took effect on 1 August, is what was read here.