The Bill That Died Over Its Own Sponsor's Example

Should a politician get veto power over jokes made at their own expense?

That's the fight buried inside HB2133, the Protect Act, and it's the reason the bill died instead of becoming law.

The bill itself was built around a real problem. It required commercial websites publishing sexual material, real, illustrated, or AI-generated, to verify two things before posting: that everyone shown was an adult, and that everyone shown had actually consented to the material being created, distributed, and published. Sites would have had to keep records of that verification and take real steps to catch unverified uploads before they went live, not after. Penalties started at $10,000 a day, up to $250,000 if a minor was involved, and both the Attorney General and the victim could sue. Sponsor Rep. Nick Kupper built this specifically to stop nonconsensual and AI-generated sexual content before it spreads, not just to give victims a way to chase it down once it's already out.

That's a serious tool aimed at a serious problem, and as of March, reporting suggested Governor Hobbs' office was actually working to get the bill into shape to sign. This wasn't heading for an automatic veto.

Then it hit a wall in committee, and the wall was Kupper's own words. Describing how broadly the bill's consent requirement would reach, he used a South Park example: a scene depicting Trump in bed with Satan would need Trump's written consent before anyone could upload it. Hobbs' veto letter to Speaker Montenegro quoted that testimony directly and said the bill would have "a chilling effect on free speech and would violate First Amendment rights to engage in satirical discourse about elected officials."

Kupper says that's wrong, and he says it forcefully. He called Hobbs' free speech explanation a "bald-faced lie," insisted the bill's satire exemption is "airtight," and accused Hobbs and most legislative Democrats of choosing party politics over protecting victims. He's promised to bring the bill back next session.

Both of those things can be true at once from a legal standpoint, which is exactly the problem. A bill can genuinely intend to protect a satire exemption and still be written broadly enough that a court, or a platform trying to avoid a $10,000-a-day penalty, reads it the other way. Civil liberties advocates raised a version of this same concern back in March, independent of Hobbs entirely, warning the bill's language was broad enough to sweep in things nobody was trying to ban, one lobbyist's example was reposting Mapplethorpe or Warhol nude photography, which would technically require consent from models who may be dead, unreachable, or never asked. Platforms facing that kind of exposure don't fight it out in court. They just block the content, or block Arizona.

None of this is a story about digital ID. This bill actually does the opposite of what the app-store and social-media bills this session did: it doesn't build any identity-verification infrastructure, and it puts real enforcement teeth behind it with a private right of action, the exact thing missing from the bills that did get signed or that failed for other reasons this year. HB2133's problem isn't architecture. It's scope. The same consent requirement built to stop deepfake abuse doesn't have a clean line separating "nonconsensual sexual content" from "unflattering cartoon of a sitting president," and the bill's own sponsor is the one who drew that line in public, in front of a committee, on the record.

This is our read of the bill. We encourage you to read it yourself and reach your own conclusions. The sources are public and cited below.