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Bus. & Prof. Code, § 22670 · Chapter 22.7. Digital Identity Theft

Bus. & Prof. Code, § 22670

Verbatim from the official edition

Text — As published in the Legislative Counsel's database, tables dated October 18, 2026 (pubinfo_2025.zip)

(a) (1) “Covered material” means material that meets all of the following criteria:

(A) The material is an image or video created or altered through digitization that would appear to a reasonable person to be an image or video of any of the following:

(i) An intimate body part of an identifiable person.

(ii) An identifiable person engaged in an act of sexual intercourse, sodomy, oral copulation, or sexual penetration.

(iii) An identifiable person engaged in masturbation.

(B) The reporting person is the person depicted in the material, and the reporting person did not consent to the use of the reporting person’s likeness in the material.

(C) The material is displayed, stored, or hosted on the social media platform.

(2) “Covered material” does not include an image or video that contains only minor alterations that do not lead to significant changes to the perceived content or meaning of the content, including changes to brightness or contrast of images and other minor changes that do not impact the content of the image or video.

(b) “Reporting user” means a natural person who reports material to a social media platform using the mechanism provided by the social media platform pursuant to Section 22671.

(c) “Sexually explicit digital identity theft” means the posting of covered material on a social media platform.

(d) (1) “Social media platform” has, except as provided in paragraph (2), the same meaning as defined in Section 22675.

(2) “Social media platform” does not include either of the following:

(A) A stand-alone direct messaging service that provides end-to-end encrypted communication or the portion of a multiservice platform that uses end-to-end encrypted communication.

(B) An internet-based service or application owned or operated by a nonprofit organization exempt from federal income tax pursuant to Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.

Notes and commentary — not statutory text

History

Added by Stats. 2024, Ch. 292, Sec. 1. (SB 981) Effective January 1, 2025.

Source of truth

Edition
As published in the Legislative Counsel's database, tables dated October 18, 2026 (pubinfo_2025.zip)
Official file
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=BPC&sectionNum=22670.
Text hash
sha256 3d35d27acef9ffb5f5d45b2af6c1d6e7a7bb129ba153ff12ded2d6e9998d5653
Composed by
compose_ca.py 2026-10-22: the Legislative Counsel's CAML content files read by a tokenizer (caml_readers.reader_a); an independent xml.etree reading (caml_readers.reader_b) agrees on every section

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Procedural information only. Not legal advice and not a substitute for the advice of an attorney. Confirm the current text with the official publisher before relying on it.