Minnesota criminalised the dissemination of election deepfakes in 2023. The statute is narrow, and the narrowness is deliberate — each limiting element is doing constitutional work. Reading it as “you may not post AI-generated political content in Minnesota” gets both the compliance answer and the legal risk wrong.
The elements of the offence
The provision is Minnesota Statutes section 609.771, enacted in 2023 and amended in 2024. The Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes publishes the current text, and it is short enough to read in full — which is the right thing to do, because the summaries in circulation drop elements.
A person commits the offence by disseminating a deepfake, or entering into a contract or other agreement to disseminate one, where all of the following hold:
- Consent is absent. The dissemination is without the consent of the individual depicted.
- The person knows, or acts recklessly as to, its falsity. The statute requires that the person knows the item is a deepfake or acts with reckless disregard about whether it is. This is the element that keeps an unwitting resharer outside the offence and it is deliberately drawn from defamation’s actual- malice vocabulary.
- Intent. The dissemination is with intent to injure a candidate or to influence the result of an election.
- Timing. The dissemination occurs within ninety days before an election at which the candidate appears on the ballot or a party nominating convention, or after the start of absentee or early voting. The window is a live element of the offence, not a statute of limitations.
All of those must be present together. A deepfake distributed six months before an election is not within section 609.771. Neither is one distributed with consent, nor one distributed by a person who genuinely did not know and was not reckless. This matters practically: a platform or an agency assessing whether a specific item is unlawful in Minnesota is running a four-part test, and most items fail at least one part.
This page describes the elements of a criminal statute. It is not legal advice and it is not a defence strategy. If you are being asked to distribute, host or produce synthetic political media, take advice on the specific item and the specific jurisdiction.
How the statute defines a deepfake
Section 609.771 defines a deepfake by effect rather than by technology. Broadly, it covers video, audio or images generated in whole or in part with technical means, depicting speech or conduct of an individual that did not occur, and realistic enough that a reasonable person would believe it depicts real speech or conduct. Two features of that drafting are worth pulling out.
It is technology-neutral. Nothing in it requires a generative model, and a sufficiently convincing edit made with conventional tools is within the definition. Statutes that instead define the conduct by naming a technique tend to be obsolete within a legislative session; this one avoids that.
And it carries a realism threshold. An obviously synthetic caricature is outside the definition because a reasonable person would not believe it depicts real conduct. That threshold is the statute’s main concession to satire, and it is a narrower concession than an express satire exemption would be, which is one of the things the litigation is about.
Penalties and the forfeiture provision
The base offence is a misdemeanour, escalating to a gross misdemeanour and then to a felony for repeat conduct and for conduct within the highest-intent tier; the statute sets out the gradation, including a felony exposure with a term of imprisonment and a fine for a person with a prior conviction under the section. Read the current text for the exact tiers rather than relying on a description — the 2024 amendment adjusted them.
The distinctive remedy is not criminal at all. Section 609.771 provides that a candidate who is convicted of violating it forfeits the nomination or office. That is a severe and unusual consequence, and it is aimed squarely at the campaign that produces the material rather than at the platform that carries it — a useful signal about who the legislature was actually regulating.
The civil route
Alongside the criminal offence, the section authorises an action for injunctive relief, which may be brought by a candidate, by the Attorney General, or by a county attorney. This is the part that has practical consequences on a compressed timeline: an injunction sought four days before a vote is a different proceeding from a prosecution that concludes a year later, and it is the route by which a dispute about a particular advertisement actually reaches a judge.
It also raises a prior-restraint question that the criminal provision does not. An injunction against future dissemination of specified speech is the classically disfavoured remedy in American First Amendment doctrine, and how a Minnesota court would handle an application on an emergency schedule is not something any published decision has settled.
The constitutional challenge
Section 609.771 has been challenged in federal court in the District of Minnesota in Kohls v. Ellison, brought by a satirical content creator and a state legislator, seeking to enjoin the statute on First Amendment and related grounds. The core arguments are the familiar ones for this class of statute: that political speech receives the highest protection, that the realism threshold is not a sufficient substitute for a satire and parody exemption, and that a statute reaching “influence the result of an election” sweeps in commentary.
What the litigation has decided and what it has not is the part to be careful about. The case became widely known for a collateral episode — a declaration filed in support of the state was found to contain citations that did not exist, apparently generated by a language model, and the court excluded it. That episode says something important about expert practice and nothing whatsoever about the constitutionality of the statute; treating it as a ruling on the merits is a mistake that has been made in print more than once. See fabricated citations and court sanctions.
The statute has not been repealed and, unless and until a court orders otherwise, it remains on the books. Anyone advising on it needs the current docket rather than this page: check the District of Minnesota’s docket for Kohls v. Ellison and any subsequent appellate history before relying on the position described here.
Litigation posture goes stale faster than anything else on this site. The description above is of the case as filed and its interlocutory history at the time of writing; it is not a prediction of outcome, and no court has been assumed to have decided anything it has not.
For how Minnesota’s approach compares with the disclosure-based drafting most states chose, see the multi-state snapshot; for the labelling duty the European Union imposes on the producer rather than the disseminator, see the AI Act’s deepfake labelling duty.
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