Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

After California passed laws cracking down on AI-generated deepfakes of election-related content, a popular conservative influencer promptly sued, accusing California of censoring protected speech, including satire and parody.

In his complaint, Christopher Kohls—who is known as "Mr Reagan" on YouTube and X (formerly Twitter)—said that he was suing "to defend all Americans’ right to satirize politicians." He claimed that California laws, AB 2655 and AB 2839, were urgently passed after X owner Elon Musk shared a partly AI-generated parody video on the social media platform that Kohls created to "lampoon" presidential hopeful Kamala Harris.

AB 2655, known as the "Defending Democracy from Deepfake Deception Act," prohibits creating "with actual malice" any "materially deceptive audio or visual media of a candidate for elective office with the intent to injure the candidate’s reputation or to deceive a voter into voting for or against the candidate, within 60 days of the election." It requires social media platforms to block or remove any reported deceptive material and label "certain additional content" deemed "inauthentic, fake, or false" to prevent election interference.

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Google has won an appeal against a €1.5 billion competition fine from the European Commission in a victory for the Big Tech group as it comes under growing scrutiny from Brussels regulators.

The EU’s General Court said on Wednesday that while it accepted “most of the commission’s assessments” that the company had used its dominant position to block rival online advertisers, it annulled the hefty fine levied against Google in the case.

When launching the action against Google in 2019, Margrethe Vestager, the bloc’s competition chief, said that the search giant had imposed anti-competitive restrictions on third-party websites for a decade between 2006 and 2016. She justified the €1.5 billion fine by arguing that it reflected the “serious and sustained nature” of the infringement.

Enlarge / The state of New York says that this guy is the "assman," not me. Show him the butt ads! (credit: Seinfeld)

According to my research, everyone has a butt.

But that doesn't mean, when I'm imbibing my morning cuppa and reading up on the recent presidential debate, that I want to see an ad showing an illustrated derrière with a bar of soap clenched firmly between its two ripe cheeks.

The ad that finally broke me.

Yet there it was, a riotous rump residing right in the middle of a New York Times article this week, causing me to reflect on just how far the Gray Lady has stooped to pick up those ad dollars lying in the gutter.