House State Affairs to Examine Gaming Platform Safety, Age Verification and Section 230 Limits

The Texas House Committee on State Affairs will gavel in at 10 a.m. Sept. 15 in Room JHR 140 to take invited and public testimony on a single interim charge: whether online gaming platforms expose children to violent and sexually explicit content and to adult strangers, and what the state can do about it that a federal court will let stand. Electronic comments can be filed through the House comment portal until the hearing adjourns, and in-person witnesses must register through the House witness registration system. The panel meets the day after the Senate State Affairs Committee takes up much the same subject.

Rep. Ken King, R–Canadian, chairs the 15-member panel — nine Republicans and six Democrats — with Rep. Ana Hernandez, D–Houston, as vice chair, according to the committee’s page. The charge is not part of the committee’s original interim assignment. Speaker Dustin Burrows issued it as a supplemental charge on April 20 after Rep. Don McLaughlin, R–Uvalde, reported finding a virtual re-creation of the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting on Roblox, as the Dispatch reported at the time. Sept. 15 is the committee’s first public hearing on it.

The charge’s first task is diagnostic: identify the risks minors face and judge whether platform safeguards — third-party content moderation, parental controls, content labeling, chat filters and governance policies — actually work, and whether platforms weigh engagement above safety, according to the hearing notice. Attorney General Ken Paxton has already made that argument in court, suing Roblox in November 2025 and accusing the company of deceiving parents about the dangers on its platform. Texas was the third state to sue Roblox, after Kentucky and Louisiana.

The second task asks whether the state’s existing age-verification and parental-consent rules should reach gaming platforms at all. Texas has two laws on that ground. Senate Bill 2420, the App Store Accountability Act, requires app stores to verify users’ ages and obtain parental consent for minors; a federal judge enjoined it in December 2025, the Fifth Circuit stayed that order, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to block enforcement in July, leaving the law in force while the appeal proceeds. The state’s age-verification requirement for pornography sites survived its own challenge last year, a result the Dispatch covered when Paxton claimed the win. Neither law was written with games in mind.

The third and hardest task is the case law. Members are directed to review platforms’ civil liability and the reach of First Amendment and federal preemption defenses, including Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Texas already has an answer it will not like. On July 24 the Fifth Circuit upheld an injunction against the monitoring-and-filtering requirement in the SCOPE Act, the 2023 law governing minors’ use of digital services, holding that Section 230 preempts a state command to screen lawful third-party content. The ruling left the law’s parental-control, privacy and targeted-advertising provisions intact, as Texas Policy Research noted in its analysis. Any rule aimed at what other users post inside a game runs into the same wall.

That is why the remaining bullets matter. The charge asks members to assess the civil and criminal exposure of the third-party developers who build experiences on platforms like Roblox, and whether platforms can or will identify who made them — a route to liability that does not require the platform to be treated as the publisher. It closes by asking for recommendations, explicitly, that are unconstrained by federal preemption or immunity defenses. The House Public Health Committee worked adjacent ground in August, when it heard testimony on social media and minors.

Because this is an interim hearing, the committee will take no votes and no legislation is before it. What members hear will shape the panel’s interim report and the online-safety bills filed for the 90th Legislature, which convenes in January 2027.

Meeting at a glance

Committee members

• Rep. Ken King, R–Canadian (HD-88) — Chair
• Rep. Ana Hernandez, D–Houston (HD-143) — Vice Chair
• Rep. Rafael Anchía, D–Dallas (HD-103)
• Rep. Drew Darby, R–San Angelo (HD-72)
• Rep. Yvonne Davis, D–Dallas (HD-111)
• Rep. Charlie Geren, R–Fort Worth (HD-99)
• Rep. Ryan Guillen, R–Rio Grande City (HD-31)
• Rep. Lacey Hull, R–Houston (HD-138)
• Rep. John W. McQueeney, R–Fort Worth (HD-97)
• Rep. Will Metcalf, R–Conroe (HD-16)
• Rep. Dade Phelan, R–Beaumont (HD-21)
• Rep. Richard Peña Raymond, D–Laredo (HD-42)
• Rep. John T. Smithee, R–Amarillo (HD-86)
• Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D–Houston (HD-141)
• Rep. Chris Turner, D–Grand Prairie (HD-101)