Attor­ney Gen­er­al Ken Pax­ton Secures His­toric Legal Vic­to­ry Forc­ing Dis­cord to Pro­tect Texas Chil­dren from Online Predators

Attorney General Ken Paxton secured a landmark Agreed Temporary Injunction (“TI”) against Discord that requires the tech company to give Texas children the same age-assurance and default safety protections it already provides to its users in the United Kingdom. Discord has 90 days to turn them on for every Texas user, and the order sets a new standard for what Big Tech companies can expect when they do business in this state. 

For years, Discord assured Texas parents that its platform was “safe by design” and “safe by default.” The evidence at the TI hearing told a different story. Currently, anyone in Texas, including children and adult predators seeking to do harm, can open a Discord account with nothing more than an email address and a self-reported birthday. This is a faulty honor system that anyone can clear within seconds. By default, anyone on the platform can send a child a friend request. Additionally, there are no restrictions around who can send a child a private message. When Texas’s investigator created an account as a 13-year-old girl, a stranger messaged her within moments, and within thirty seconds he solicited her for explicit sexual acts. 

In 2025 alone, Discord submitted 489,782 reports of suspected child sexual exploitation on its platform to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. That is more than 1,300 a day, every day, from a single platform. 

Discord had already solved these problems in Britain, where the law gave it a deadline. Texas got an empty promise instead. In February 2026, Discord announced that it would roll its protections out worldwide, with the United States launch only weeks away. Then it pulled back, telling the public that the rollout would wait until the second half of 2026. Although, under oath at the TI hearing, Discord would not commit to that. Discord kept Britain’s deadline. It broke its promise to Texas, leaving Texas children vulnerable to online predators. 

Over the course of a two-day evidentiary hearing, four Texas parents testified about what happened to their children on Discord. One parent described the abuse her child suffered on the platform at the hands of Charles Maitski, who is now serving a life sentence in federal prison. She told the Court that she came forward after reading that Texas had filed “a landmark lawsuit against Discord for their safety settings and their default settings,” the very settings this injunction now requires Discord to fix. Her reaction to the news, she testified, was that “something so simple could have saved what happened” to her child. 

Discord claims that users under 13 are prohibited from using its platform. But a parent testified that she emailed Discord in July 2025, identified her 11-year-old son’s account, and demanded that Discord delete it. Ten months later, an Assistant Attorney General logged into the child’s still-active account live in the courtroom. When asked how many users under 13 are on Discord, the company’s Senior Director of Product Policy answered: “None to my knowledge. If we knew, we’d remove them.” That isn’t the only thing Discord doesn’t know. Discord testified that it has 200 million monthly active users worldwide and could not say how many are in the United States, how many are teenagers, how many of those teenagers are in Texas, or how many adults are posing as teenagers on the platform. 

Texas’s expert testified that extending Discord’s existing UK safety features to Texas children was “just a matter of turning it on for Texas.” Discord’s own witnesses said much the same. Its Senior Director of Product Policy acknowledged that Discord does “not currently” confirm any American user’s age at signup. She also agreed that the company has the capability to make every change Texas asked for. Discord’s own retained expert agreed that those changes would make it more difficult for adults posing as teenagers to reach children. Faced with its own witnesses agreeing under oath that Texas’s safeguards would work, Discord agreed to make them. 

Texas was not the first state to take Discord to court. New Jersey sued fifteen months ago, and Nevada, Indiana, and Arkansas have sued as well. Texas filed this lawsuit on May 22, 2026, and secured a TRO against Discord. Seven weeks later, Texas alone had obtained a temporary injunction extending age assurance and default settings protections to Texas children—immediately, not at the conclusion of trial. 

“Discord built a platform where adult predators could hunt Texas children, then looked parents in the eye and told them it was safe,” said Attorney General Paxton. “It wasn’t. Discord built safety measures to protect these kids. It extended these measures to children in Britain and denied them to children in Texas. That ends now. My office forced Discord to turn those protections on for every Texas child, and I will never stop fighting to keep predators away from our kids.” 

A temporary injunction is not the end of this case. It is, however, a court order rather than a corporate promise, and the difference matters here: Discord announced these protections to the world and then took the announcement back. It cannot take a court order back. Under the order, Discord must route messages from strangers into a separate request inbox, block sensitive content for Texas teens and lock that setting unless it confirms the user is an adult, and close adult-only spaces to anyone it has not age-assured. Discord must report its progress to the Office of the Attorney General every 30 days, the order binds the company until final judgment, and it is enforceable by contempt. The case now proceeds to trial, where Texas will seek civil penalties under the DTPA for Discord’s deceptive conduct. 

The order does not ask Texas users to hand over anything new. It adopts the age-assurance system Discord designed, built, and already runs in Britain. Details of this system can be found here. By Discord’s own published account of that system, more than 90 percent of users are never asked to confirm their age at all, facial age estimation runs entirely on the user’s own phone and never leaves it, and identity documents go to Discord’s vendor, never to Discord, and are deleted as soon as age is confirmed. 

Attorney General Paxton is publishing the record of both hearing days. Discord’s own witnesses are the strongest evidence in this case, and he invites parents, policymakers, and every lawyer litigating against a platform to read what they said under oath. 

To read the Temporary Injunction, click here. 

To read the Day 1 Hearing Transcript, click here. 

To read the Day 2 Hearing Transcript, click here.