- A court in Texas has given Discord an ultimatum to implement stricter age verification processes and amend their default settings within 90 days to provide the same level of protection that is currently available in the United Kingdom.
- Texas filed a lawsuit against Discord for misleading parents into believing that the platform was secure despite the vulnerabilities in its default settings that allowed predators to get in touch with children.
- Discord must report its progress to the court every 30 days as the case proceeds to trial, as Texas can seek civil penalties under state law.
A Texas court has ordered Discord to improve its child safety protections following a lawsuit from the state’s attorney general. The platform must introduce stronger age checks and safer default settings for users in Texas. The court gave Discord 90 days to implement these changes.
Under this order, Discord must apply the same safety level for children in Texas as it gives in the UK. According to the Texas authorities, Discord assured parents about the safety of their platform. But in reality, the platform did not have any of the safety measures that were already implemented in other countries.
What the Court Order Requires
The temporary injunction forces Discord to make several immediate changes for Texas users. The platform must transmit messages from strangers to a separate request inbox. It must also block sensitive content for Texas teens and lock that setting unless the company confirms the user is an adult. Additionally, Discord must close adult-only spaces to anyone it has not age-assured.
Discord must also report its improvement to the office of Attorney General of Texas every 30 days. This order controls the company until the final judgment, and the court can enforce it through contempt proceedings. The case will now move to trial, as Texas can pursue civil penalties following the Deceptive Trade Practices Act of the state.
The order does not require Texas users to hand over any new information. Instead, it adopts the system of age-assurance Discord built and is already operating in Britain.
Under that system, more than 90 percent of users never need to confirm their age at all. Facial age evaluation is functional on the phone of each user. Identity details go to the vendor of Discord, not to Discord, and are deleted as soon as age is confirmed. Discord has been testing this age verification with a new vendor, Incode, amid ongoing privacy concerns.
Why Texas Took Legal Action
Texas filed its lawsuit against Discord on May 22, this year. The state alleged that the platform misled users about their safety features but exposes minors to risks of exploitation. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accused Discord of designing ‘a predator’s paradise’ with safeguards switched off by default.
The evidence at the hearing showed that anyone in Texas, including children and adult predators, could open a Discord account with nothing more than an email address and a self-reported birthday.
This system allowed anyone to clear the age check within seconds. By default, anyone on the platform could send a child a friend request. Additionally, there were no restrictions around who could send a child a private message.
When Texas investigators created an account as a 13-year-old girl, she received a message from a stranger within moments. Within thirty seconds, the stranger requested for explicit sexual acts with her.
In 2025, Discord presented 489,782 reports of suspected sexual exploitation of minors to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children; this represents more than 1,300 reports every day from a single platform.
Discord has resolved these issues in Britain, as it met the legal deadline in the region. In February this year, Discord announced it would roll its protections out worldwide, with the United States launch only a few weeks away.
But it drew back and told the public the rollout would wait until the second half of the year. Discord kept the deadline of Britain but broke its promise to Texas.
Parent Testimonies and Ongoing Case
Four Texas parents testified during the evidentiary hearing. One parent narrated the abuse of her child on the platform by Charles Maitski, though he now serves a life sentence in a federal prison.
She told the court she came forward after reading about the lawsuit from Texas against Discord. According to her testimony, the simple safety settings this injunction requires could have prevented what happened to her child.
Another parent recalled that she sent an email to Discord in July last year, identified the account of her 11-year-old son, and demanded the company delete it. After ten months, an assistant attorney general signed into the account which was still active during a court session.
Discord revealed that it has 200 million regular users each month globally. Yet, the firm didn’t disclose any figure about the number of people who utilize its services in the United States.
Also, it didn’t tell the number of registered teenagers on the app, how many of the teenage users are from Texas, or how many of the adult clients are deliberately impersonating the youngsters.
An expert of Texas testified that prolonging the existing UK safety features of Discord to Texas children was a matter of activating it for Texas.
Texas was not the first state to take Discord to court. New Jersey sued the company fifteen months ago, and Indiana, Nevada, and Arkansas have made similar moves. After Texas filed this suit, it secured an order to temporarily restrain Discord.
After seven weeks, Texas alone had obtained an injunction temporarily for extending the default settings and age assurance protections to children in Texas immediately. This order didn’t wait till the conclusion of the trial.
