§ 129B.002.Publication and Creation of Material Harmful to Minors

The operative obligation, and the threshold in subsection (a) is what makes the chapter workable.

Subsection (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 to verify the user is 18 or older.

The one-third threshold is doing the sorting. Without it the obligation would reach any site hosting some such material, which would include most large platforms. With it, the chapter targets sites whose business is that material.

How the fraction is measured is not specified, which is where compliance questions arise for a site with a large and varied library.

Subsection (a-1) extends the duty to AI tools: an entity operating a site with a publicly accessible tool for creating artificial sexual material harmful to minors, or making such an application publicly available, must verify age to access the tool.

Note that no one-third threshold applies there. A general-purpose image generator capable of producing such material is within subsection (a-1) on its face.

Subsection (a-2) is the exception that makes that workable, and it requires both a prohibition in the terms and conditions acknowledged before access and affirmative technological steps — the section names training the model to identify likely sexual material, reporting tools, filtering outputs before display, and filtering the training dataset.

Subsection (b) is the privacy protection: neither the entity nor a third party performing verification may retain any identifying information of the individual.