720-891-1663
The reason I put these state laws in here is that they affect you if you have visitors to your web site from that state.
All of these laws claim “extraterritoriality”, meaning they export the law to your state to “protect” their citizens.
This law is Texas House Bill 18 which would, if not struck down, require “digital service providers” to age-authenticate all users. This is an extension to HB 1181 which only requires porn sites to do this. The challenge to HB 1181 is pending with the Supreme Court.
Parents can “dispute” an age determination, in which case the service must treat them as a known minor.
So, for example, in the world of doxing, I could represent myself as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s parent and websites would need to treat him as a minor (I will avoid the obvious editorial here).
How exactly is, say, Twitter, which is a clear target of this law, with say, approximately 250 million average daily users, to figure who my parents are.
More importantly to this reader, how is your company supposed to figure that out. At a bare minimum you would need to know where each site visitor is a resident and then figure out whether they are an adult and finally, adjust your content to be age appropriate.
If the site somehow figures out that you are a minor, you must block that person from accessing content that “promote, glorifies or facilitates” (these terms are not defined) the following content categories:
(A) Suicide, self-harm or eating disorders
(B) substance abuse
(C) Stalking, bullying or harassment
(D) grooming, trafficking, child pornography or other sexual exploitation or abuse and
(E) Material that qualifies as obscenity for minors under Texas Penal Code Section 43.24
THIS IS A DIRECT QUOTE
It also bans targeted advertising to minors and requires parental control over minors’ activities online. It also requires transparency obligations for content ordering algorithms. Clearly this is targeted at, say, Trump’s Truth Social, but maybe they qualify under the small business exemption.
The court says HB18 is “a content- and speaker-based regulation, targeting DSPs whose primary function is to share and broadcast social speech.” The law excludes certain speakers (“news, sports, commerce, and provider-generated content”) while treating UGC (user generated content) more harshly, which triggers strict scrutiny.
While the court blocked the implementation of content filtering, it ignored the age determination part, so, I guess, that part might go into effect.
This is going to be years in the appeals process, all the way up to and including the Supreme Court.
What websites do in the meantime is really unclear. You can hope that Paxton has bigger fish to go after and he is going to ignore you and that, in many cases, is the reality.
But hope is not a great legal strategy. He might just sweep as many websites as possible using AI and use that same AI to file lawsuits. After all, he is a politician in a red state and has big political ambitions.
There are a number of exemptions under Section 509.002, but I will leave that to the reader to try and parse. Many companies will be exempt and many will not.