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California lawmakers are moving on a bill that would let the state fine content creators up to $5,000 per post when they take money from a political campaign and do not say so.
Some shit you should know before you dig in: California and Texas are the only two states with rules on the books requiring creators (including news creators) to disclose paid political content. California passed its version in 2023, but enforcement is toothless in practice, since the state’s campaign watchdog has to go get a court order to force someone to disclose, and that can drag on for months. Texas’s ethics commission passed its own disclaimer rule in 2024, New York is weighing one, and similar bills died in Utah and Georgia.
What’s going on now: The new bill from Democratic Assemblymember Marc Berman would hand the Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) the power to fine both the creator and whoever cut the check, skipping the courts entirely. “Voters should have a right to know whether or not campaigns are paying for the messaging that they’re seeing,” Berman said.
The push came out of the governor’s primary. Tom Steyer, who dropped more than $215 million of his own money and lost, caught most of the incoming for paying creators, though he was not the only candidate doing it. Xavier Becerra’s campaign faced the same accusation and denies paying outside creators.
Steyer’s campaign says it told creators they were required to disclose, and that this satisfied the law. Plenty of them did, and the FPPC is now looking into some who did not.
This all comes as both parties keep pouring money into creators willing to post for them. We’ve been offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to post news articles for political candidates on both the left and the right over the years, mainly for governor’s races in the South. We’ve never accepted the offers, but thought we’d share that this is real.
