Legislation aimed at stopping deepfakes is a bad idea - Columbia Journalism Review

There are those, including Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Lab at Harvard, who don’t believe deepfakes are even that big a problem. “Media is wildly overreacting to deepfakes, which will have almost no impact on the 2020 election,” Benton said on Twitter after the Pelosi video sparked concern about deepfakes swamping voters with disinformation. Others, including the EFF, argue that existing laws are more than enough to handle deepfakes. In any case, rushing forward with legislation aimed at correcting a problem before it even becomes obvious what the scope of the problem is—especially when that legislation has some obvious First Amendment issues—doesn’t seem wise.