Writing for spiked, Lauren Smith criticises Gavin Newsom’s authoritarian attack on parody after Elon Musk shared a patently satirical imitation of a Kamala Harris presidential campaign ad.
Smith writes, “Fake as it may be, the video certainly resonated with more people than Harris’s actual campaign ads. The real video that the AI parody was inspired by received 1.1million views on YouTube, whereas the parody has racked up almost 130million hits on X.”
“One person who failed to see the funny side was California’s authoritarian governor, Gavin Newsom. Calling Musk out on X, he raged: ‘Manipulating a voice in an “ad” like this one should be illegal. I’ll be signing a bill in a matter of weeks to make sure it is.’ Musk then responded by saying that he had ‘checked with renowned world authority, Professor Suggon Deeznutz, and he said parody is legal in America’. What a time to be alive.”
Smith continues “This is not the first time Musk and Newsom have clashed. Earlier this month, Musk announced that the headquarters of both X and SpaceX, his rocket-manufacturing company, would be moving out of California. According to Musk, the ‘final straw’ was a new piece of legislation that will ban schools from requiring teachers to notify parents if a child begins identifying as trans. Newsom reacted by accusing Musk of having ‘bent the knee’ to Donald Trump.”
Smith concludes “Fundamentally, Gavin Newsom does not trust Californians to use their own brains. He really thinks that ordinary people are incapable of telling fact from obvious fiction without the help of censorship. His humourless authoritarianism poses a far bigger threat to democracy than any AI parody.”
Worth reading in full.
Musk has been a firm supporter of online free speech. He recently accused the European Union (EU) of offering him a “secret deal” to “quietly censor” users of his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) and thereby avoid millions of pounds worth of fines.
The Tesla billionaire made the extraordinary claim after the European Commission – the EU’s executive body – said that X was “in breach” of the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which came into force last year, establishing a regulatory framework that critics have likened to an “incoherent, multilevel censorship regime” that will have a “chilling effect on free speech” and will ultimately cause “the death of free speech online”.
Read more about this secret censorship deal here.
