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Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 129B.002

PUBLICATION AND CREATION OF MATERIAL HARMFUL TO MINORS

Applied in 2 court decisions — leading case Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton (2025)

Most recently applied in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton (June 2025)

Added by Acts 2023, 88th Leg., R.S., Ch. 676 (H.B. 1181), Sec. 1, eff

(a) A commercial entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material on an Internet website, including a social media platform, more than one-third of which is sexual material harmful to minors, shall use reasonable age verification methods as described by Section 129B.003 to verify that an individual attempting to access the material is 18 years of age or older.

(a-1) Except as provided by Subsection (a-2), a commercial entity that operates an Internet website with a publicly accessible tool for creating artificial sexual material harmful to minors or otherwise makes publicly available an application for creating sexual material harmful to minors shall use reasonable age verification methods as described by Section 129B.003 to verify an individual attempting to access the tool is 18 years of age or older.

(a-2) Subsection (a-1) does not apply to a commercial entity that:

(1) includes a prohibition against the generation of artificial sexual material harmful to minors in the entity's terms and conditions or use policies that must be acknowledged before a user is granted access; and

(2) takes affirmative steps to limit the creation of artificial sexual material harmful to minors through technological tools such as training an application or software creating artificial images to identify likely sexual material, providing effective reporting tools, filtering likely sexual material, filtering sexually explicit content generated by artificial intelligence before the material is shown to users, or filtering sexually explicit images from the entity's artificial intelligence dataset before the dataset is used to train the artificial intelligence.

(b) A commercial entity that performs the age verification required by Subsection (a) or (a-1) or a third party that performs the age verification required by Subsection (a) or (a-1) may not retain any identifying information of the individual.

Official source: Texas Constitution and Statutes. Reproduced from public-domain Texas statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.