Amy Klobuchar Wants To Break The Internet Because Someone Made A Stupid Satirical Video About Her

Free Speech

from the maybe-not-the-time-for-censorship? dept

Senator Amy Klobuchar is one of the top Democrats in the Senate. She could be fighting to protect democracy against fascists. She could be working on a new, better vision for Americans. But instead, she’s focused on breaking the internet.

And now we know why: someone made a stupid satirical video about her, and her response was to write an op-ed demanding new laws to censor it. The video is obviously fake, obviously satirical, and obviously protected by the First Amendment. Klobuchar knows this—she even acknowledges the First Amendment protections in her own legislation. But she’s using this protected political speech as her prime example of why we need her NO FAKES Act to give platforms more power to take down speech.

It’s the perfect encapsulation of the authoritarian mindset critics have long warned about: a sitting senator’s first instinct when confronted with speech that mocks her is to reach for the censorship lever.

This isn’t new for Klobuchar. She has a long history of pushing obviously unconstitutional bills that would destroy the internet.

For example, remember when she had the brilliant idea to allow the head of Health & Human Services declare what content was “health misinformation” to require social media companies to take it down? Imagine just how that would be working right now with the head of Health & Human Services being the walking, talking, conspiracy theory-spewing, worm-brained RFK Jr?

She was also the key Democratic senator behind the TAKE IT DOWN Act, which did pass into law, and which Donald Trump himself has promised to use to silence criticism of himself.

Somewhere in all of this, you would hope that Senator Klobuchar and her staff might take a second to think through the consequences of these bills they keep pushing. But, no, Senator Klobuchar is instead completely freaked out because someone made a stupid satirical video “deepfake” pretending to make her say some stuff that no human being actually thinks she said.

Let’s be clear: the video that Senator Klobuchar is concerned about is (1) obviously fake and satirical, and (2) obviously protected free speech under the First Amendment. I’m going to post it here via Streamable, which means it will expire and disappear soon, because I’m actually worried about posting it somewhere more permanent, like YouTube, where Klobuchar’s threats suggest that I could have it taken down and my account banned for posting something for journalistic reasons.

The video is obviously fake. No one with any sense at all thinks that Klobuchar said anything like this:

Look, all we’re saying is that we want representation. Okay?

If Republicans are going to have beautiful girls with perfect titties in their ads, we want ads for Democrats, too, you know? We want ugly fat bitches wearing pink wigs and long-ass fake nails being loud and twerking on top of a cop car at a Waffle House cuz they didn’t get extra ketchup.

You know, just because we’re the party of ugly people doesn’t mean we can’t be featured in ads. Okay? And I know most of us are too fat to wear jeans or too ugly to go outside, but we want representation.

It’s very stupid satire, but it’s satire and it’s clearly protected speech under the First Amendment. But Klobuchar seems to believe that the First Amendment doesn’t seem to apply when people create satirical videos about her.

So I was surprised later that week when I noticed a clip of me from that hearing circulating widely on X, to the tune of more than a million views. I clicked to see what was getting so much attention.

That’s when I heard my voice — but certainly not me — spewing a vulgar and absurd critique of an ad campaign for jeans featuring Sydney Sweeney. The A.I. deepfake featured me using the phrase “perfect titties” and lamenting that Democrats were “too fat to wear jeans or too ugly to go outside.” Though I could immediately tell that someone used footage from the hearing to make a deepfake, there was no getting around the fact that it looked and sounded very real.

As anyone would, I wanted the video taken down or at least labeled “digitally altered content.” It was using my likeness to stoke controversy where it did not exist. It had me saying vile things.

Yeah, except the First Amendment doesn’t allow for a sitting senator to take down First Amendment-protected speech, in the same way that it doesn’t allow a sitting president to take down an AI-generated deep fake image of himself wandering naked in the desert. That’s political speech, as this deepfake was (even if it’s crude and silly).

The contrast with how a competent politician handles this couldn’t be starker. When someone created an almost identical deepfake of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—same fake controversy, similarly ridiculous fake quotes—AOC didn’t run to write new censorship laws. Instead, when newscaster Chris Cuomo fell for it and stupidly tweeted at her as if the quotes were real, AOC simply mocked Cuomo for being a gullible hack.

That’s AOC saying:

This is a deepfake dude. Please use your critical thinking skills. At this point you’re just reposting Facebook memes and calling it journalism

That’s the difference between understanding that political speech—even crude, stupid political speech—is protected, and having the authoritarian instinct to immediately reach for legal remedies against speech you don’t like.

No calling for unconstitutional laws. No demanding the (in poor taste) satire be hidden. Just straight up mockery for anyone so stupid as to fall for it.

Klobuchar uses this experience to call for a law even worse than the TAKE IT DOWN Act, her NO FAKES Act.

That is why I am again working across the aisle on a bill to give all Americans more control over how deepfakes of our voices and visual likenesses are used. The proposed bipartisan NO FAKES Act, cosponsored by Senators Chris Coons, Marsha Blackburn, Thom Tillis and me, would give people the right to demand that social media companies remove deepfakes of their voice and likeness, while making exceptions for speech protected by the First Amendment.

I mean, but this video is clearly protected by the First Amendment. And just this article is creating a chilling effect. I’m posting it only via a temporary, disposable, anonymous hosting service because the fact that a sitting US Senator is threatening platforms that host this content makes me wary of posting it there, even as the context here is obviously journalistic.

We’ve talked about just how bad the NO FAKES Act is. And just last week, Stanford’s Daphne Keller published an incredibly thorough takedown of just how dangerous the NO FAKES Act would be. Keller’s summary:

NO FAKES creates a restrictive new legal regime for realistic, computer-generated, content that has been significantly altered or was never real in the first place. This “fake” content will be legal for creators who acquire licenses from the people depicted. But it is otherwise prohibited – subject to a long, hard-to-parse list of exceptions for First Amendment-protected speech like parody and news reporting. The difficulty of applying those exceptions or distinguishing real from fake content, along with the bill’s astronomical statutory damages, will cast a long shadow of potential liability over journalists, artists, parodists, and more

I mean, just the fact that Klobuchar herself is using First Amendment protected satire as her example of why she needs NO FAKES to remove that First Amendment-protected speech should tell you everything you need to know about the usefulness of the “ long, hard-to-parse list of exceptions for First Amendment-protected speech like parody and news reporting.”

As Keller warns, NO FAKES would be a disaster for the open internet:

The difficulty of applying those exceptions or distinguishing real from fake content, along with the bill’s astronomical statutory damages, will cast a long shadow of potential liability over journalists, artists, parodists, and more. That threat to legal speech is heightened by NO FAKES’ extensive new licensing regime, which will allow profit-motivated third party agents to demand payments from content creators and distributors on behalf of both the living and the dead. Finally, the bill establishes a “notice and takedown” regime that puts decisions about speech – along with major liability risks for leaving that speech online – in the hands of risk-averse private platforms. Once content is removed, many platforms – including ranging from Wikipedia to Craigslist and more – will need to deploy flawed technical filters that prevent other users from sharing the same material, even in new and lawful contexts. The bill almost seems designed to make platforms take down far more speech than lawmakers could ever prohibit under the First Amendment.

If well-documented history is any guide, we should expect platforms to receive a deluge of mistaken or simply fraudulent notices targeting lawful speech under NO FAKES. The bill’s unclear mandates and steep statutory damages will give platforms every reason to comply with over-reaching takedown demands. A lot of these demands will likely come from ordinary people or the companies to whom those people license their rights, and target content that could plausibly be either real or fake. Sending groundless NO FAKES claims as damage control will also be a tempting option for powerful people who want to prevent the spread of embarrassing pictures they took with an old friend, Jumbotron footage, or “falsified” videos that may be offensive but are clearly labeled as satire.

There’s a lot more in Keller’s paper that is worth reading, but I think Klobuchar’s own op-ed here tells us all we need to know about the problems of NO FAKES. She is responding to First Amendment-protected speech that parodies (poorly) her own speech, and her first reaction is “how can I pass a law to censor this speech.”

Again, doing so at a time when those in power, including Donald Trump, have made it clear that they will use any technique at their disposal to intimidate and silence those who criticize or mock them is so incredibly tone deaf. Klobuchar is obsessed with “bipartisanship” at a time when that just means “giving fascists more powers to censor critics” and she’s ready to jump on board because some rando person made a silly, obviously fake satire video that made it look like she said silly things no one would ever think she’d actually say.

It’s almost the perfect encapsulation of how out of touch and feckless Klobuchar is: she’s happy to hand an authoritarian, censor-happy government way more power to silence speech, so long as she also gets to remove a video that made fun of her.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, ai, amy klobuchar, censorship, deepfakes, free speech, no fakes, no fakes act, sidney sweeney