Law note · California

AB 730, as extended by AB 972, election deepfake disclosure law

Citation	Cal. Elec. Code Section 20010
Status	In effect
In force	2020-01-01
Reviewed	as of 2026-08-14

Prohibits, with actual malice, distributing materially deceptive audio or visual election media depicting a candidate within 60 days of an election, intending to injure the candidate's reputation or deceive a voter, unless the distributor discloses that the media has been manipulated. AB 972 extended the original 2023-01-01 sunset to 2027-01-01, confirmed against FindLaw's codified-statute history note showing the section added by Stats. 2019, c. 493 (AB 730) and amended by Stats. 2022, c. 745 (AB 972), so the disclosure-exemption structure remains in force. This statute was not a party to the litigation that enjoined AB 2839 or struck down AB 2655. The 2020-01-01 effective date follows the standard non-urgency operative date for a bill approved 2019-10-03, and is independently corroborated by multiple contemporaneous legal-press sources (Davis Wright Tremaine, Akin Gump) describing AB 730 as having taken effect January 1, 2020.

Primary source: official California Legislative Information (leginfo) chaptered bill text, for AB 730 and its AB 972 sunset extension

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