New Jersey A4146

Age verification mandate. Relevant features:

• Enforcement:
  • Private lawsuits for damages and up to $2,500 per instance of violation
  • The state Division of Consumer Affairs is charged with investigating alleged violations and enforcing the provisions of the bill
    • Before initiating an enforcement action, the division must provide 30 days written notice identifying and explaining the basis for each alleged violation.
    • If the entity does not cure a violation, the division may initiate a civil action. The division is authorized to impose a civil penalty of up to $5,000 for each violation or to initiate a civil suit in Superior Court.
• Age verification mechanisms allowed:
  • digitized information card;
  • an independent, third-party age verification service that compares the personal information entered by the individual to the material that is available from a commercially available database or aggregate of databases, which databases are regularly used by government agencies and businesses for the purpose of age and identity verification; or
  • any other reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data to verify the age of the individual.
• Also requires the Division of Consumer Affairs to:
  • establish standards and guidelines for reasonable methods of age verification that an entity can use
  • establish standards and guidelines concerning the types of content deemed "material harmful to minors" and what is suitable for minors of different age groups
• The threshold of content that must be “harmful to minors” is defined as:
  • for a social media platform, more than one-third of total user accounts contain any material harmful to minors, or more than one-third of the content on one or more user’s account on that platform contains material harmful to minors;
  • for a search engine, more than one third of the webpages displayed in response to any user query contain any material harmful to minors, or more than one-third of the thumbnail images displayed in response to any user query contain any material harmful to minors; or
  • for any website or webpage, including a search engine, more than one-third of the total content on the website or on any individual webpage contains any material harmful to minors, except that when a website contains a hypertext link to a third-party website, the material on such third party website shall not be considered toward the total percentage of material if that third-party website does not contain material harmful to minors and if such linking does not constitute an attempt to intentionally dilute the percentage calculation of material harmful to minors in order to evade the provisions of the law