But how does one decide what constitutes a piece of content\u2014or whether or not something is considered pornographic?<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s mostly a counting question in terms of \u2018does the law apply\u2019\u201d Alan Butler, the executive director of Electronic Privacy Information Center, previously told WIRED.<\/p>\n
Kupper, who sponsored Arizona\u2019s age verification law, tells WIRED he stuck to the one-third threshold because it\u2019s been previously upheld by the United States Supreme Court. He says he\u2019s heard estimates that 15 to 25 percent of accounts on X are at least somewhat pornographic, but he\u2019s not sure how accurate that is, nor does he think it\u2019s \u201cfeasible\u201d to analyze such ratios on every website. X did not respond to questions about what percentage of the platform it considers pornographic.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don’t think you should have a threshold. It should be: Do you have pornographic material on your site? OK. I’m not saying you have to age-verify for your entire site, but for any of the pornographic material, you should have to age-verify,\u201d Kupper says. Posts on X that are marked as \u201cage-restricted adult content\u201d can only be viewed by users who are logged in and over the age of 18, though X generally expects<\/a> users uploading restricted content to mark it as explicit themselves. WIRED wasn\u2019t able to find similar restrictions for pornographic links on the Grok website.<\/p>\n Kupper says in Arizona\u2019s case, individuals would need to bring forth a complaint\u2014for example, if their child was harmed by pornographic material on X\u2014and the court would then have to make X prove that less than one-third of its content is pornographic.<\/p>\n Nebraska state senator Dave Murman, who spearheaded age verification legislation there, tells WIRED he isn\u2019t sure about Grok\u2019s independent site but that \u201cX does not have at least one-third of its content sexually inappropriate or harmful to minors.\u201d However, when asked if the state had measured that, he says it hadn\u2019t\u2014and isn\u2019t aware of any state that had.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile I would of course prefer a system where every single possible piece of pornographic content is behind an age gate, passing legislation to do so without implicating the valid free-speech rights of social media sites seemed logistically impossible,\u201d he says. \u201cWhile I don\u2019t know if there is a legislative solution to getting pornography off of social media sites like X, I do hope the company takes action.\u201d<\/p>\n