Our Agenda

The California Initiative for Technology and Democracy’s agenda includes providing expertise and recommendations to Sacramento policymakers, nonpartisan voter education, and thought leadership and unbiased analysis for the press and civil society.

Policy Recommendations in Sacramento

In its first legislative session, CITED cemented itself as Sacramento’s go-to source of independent, unbiased policy expertise where technology issues impact democracy and voters. CITED successfully sponsored legislation in 2024 that fights online election disinformation by requiring social media platforms to label election-related deepfakes (AB 2655, Berman) and bans the use of deepfakes that deceive voters in political advertising (AB 2839, Pellerin). CITED was heavily involved in legislation that created the nation’s first digital provenance standards for generative AI content (SB 942, Becker).

There is much more work to be done. But despite widespread public support for action, Washington DC is not answering the call – making CITED’s work more critical than ever. California must uphold the integrity of our elections and democracy, especially under a new federal administration that is willing to weaponize government power and is flanked by the most powerful and wealthiest tech CEOs in the world.

This year, CITED is proud to back a package of bills designed to fight the new digital threats to our elections and democracy. These bills and all CITED policy recommendations are divorced from partisanship and ideology — safeguarding our democracy matters to every Californian regardless of party — and have been vetted by CITED leaders from tech, law, public policy, academia, civil rights, and civic engagement, as well as national leaders in the field.

CITED has priority support positions on the following bills:

  • Provenance, authenticity, and watermarking standards (AB 853, Wicks): Builds on the California AI Transparency Act passed in 2024 (aka SB 942, Becker), which created standards for watermarking content created by generative AI. Ensures large online platforms let their users know whether content is real or fake and establishes provenance standards for media created by cameras and other recording devices. 

  • Deepfake labeling on social media (Pellerin): Builds upon AB 2839 (Pellerin), passed last year, which bans deepfakes in political campaign advertisements and other communications to voters. This bill seeks to improve enforceability through improved labeling, clarification of satire provisions, and better targeting of who can seek relief. 

  • Location data privacy (AB 1355, Ward): Prevents the collection, sale to a third party, or use of an individual’s sensitive location data. Included in the bill is barring the sharing of location data with federal agencies, which has become more critical for democracy protection and the exercise of speech rights as the Trump Administration has weaponized government power to target protestors and political adversaries.

  • Social media platform financial accountability (AB 2, Lowenthal): Holds social media platforms financially liable for harms they cause a child when it’s proven that platforms fail to exercise ordinary care toward that child.

  • Social media warning labels (AB 56, Bauer-Kahan): Creates a warning label for kids after three hours of social media use so parents, adolescents, and the public are properly informed about the risks of social media use, in alignment with a recommendation from the Office of the Surgeon General.

  • Artificial intelligence defenses (AB 316, Krell): Clarifies state law so the creators or deployers of AI systems that cause harm cannot avoid legal responsibility by claiming that the AI acted autonomously to cause the harm.

  • Chatbot disclosure (AB 410, Wilson): Requires chatbots that run on generative AI, which are often designed to impersonate human speech and behavior and have been shown to create emotional dependencies in children, to disclose that they are a bot when communicating with users in California.

  • Automated Decision System transparency (AB 1018, Bauer-Kahan): Provides consumers and workers with information and transparency about the use of Automated Decision Systems for critical areas of their lives, including voting rights.

  • Ethical AI development for kids (AB 1064, Bauer Kahan): Establishes a new Leading Ethical AI Development (LEAD) for Kids Standards Board within the California Government Operations Agency to create regulations for children’s interactions with AI systems.

  • Information privacy (AB 1337, Ward): Modernizes California’s Information Practices Act to extend protections for location data, online browsing records, IP addresses, citizenship status, and genetic information.

Public Education and Community Engagement

This year, CITED will host a series of educational briefings at the State Capitol intended to deepen understanding of tech policy among California’s policymakers, especially at the intersection of technology and democracy. CITED’s briefings provide audiences in Sacramento the opportunity to hear from experts whose sole motive is to drive policy centered on the public interest, rather than the profit-driven motives of the tech industry. 

This follows CITED’s series of nine community forums in 2024 that educated community leaders and trusted messengers about the threats AI-powered disinformation poses to elections. Held in different regions around California, the forums were each co-hosted with a civic engagement partner organization rooted in the region to heighten public awareness among all California voters about being smarter, more skeptical consumers of information and specifically inoculate communities of color, voters that prefer a language other than English, and others from targeted, racialized disinformation. 

CITED produced the policy white paper below, “Democracy On Edge in the Digital Age: Protecting Democracy in California in the Era of AI-Powered Disinformation and Unregulated Social Media,” in January 2024. It provides a statement of the problem and a landscape analysis of solutions, including ideas emerging from the European Union, the White House, Congress, and states around the country. It also discusses the limitations placed on possible solutions by the First Amendment, Section 230, and other policy and legal obstacles. “Democracy On Edge in the Digital Age” outlines the context in which California will operate if it has the courage to lead the fight nationally to find and implement solutions that can protect our democracy from the threats posed by AI, deepfakes, and disinformation.