Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton today filed a landmark lawsuit against Discord, Inc. in Collin County District Court, alleging the San Francisco-based platform engaged in systematic deception of parents and consumers while knowingly allowing child predators, extremist networks, and exploitative content to operate on its platform. The filing, dated May 22, 2026, marks a significant escalation in a legal campaign against Discord that began in October 2025.

The suit, brought under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act (DTPA), Texas Business & Commerce Code sections 17.41 to 17.63, seeks civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation, a court order compelling Discord to default all safety settings to maximum protection, mandatory age verification under the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment (SCOPE) Act, and disgorgement of all revenue derived from unlawful conduct. Texas also seeks attorneys' fees and costs.

A platform with 650 million accounts and a self-reported age field

The petition lays out a core technical argument: Discord has approximately 650 million registered accounts and around 60 million daily active users, yet its account creation process requires nothing more than an email address and a self-declared age. According to the Texas petition, that arrangement makes age enforcement structurally impossible. A 45-year-old adult can register as a 13-year-old with no mechanism to detect or prevent it. A banned user can return to the platform within four minutes by using a VPN for IP masking, a disposable email address, and a new username.

Discord has publicly stated it does not allow children under 13 on its platform and maintains a zero-tolerance policy for anyone who endangers or sexualizes children. The lawsuit argues those representations are false, not because Discord lacks the language to make them, but because its product architecture was designed to make them unenforceable.

"Discord has allowed and invited all kinds of nihilistic violence and evil," said Attorney General Paxton. "My office is taking action to protect our nation's precious children from predators. We live in a time where the dangers children face online have never been greater, and every parent in Texas deserves to know their child is protected."

Default settings designed for maximum exposure

The technical section of the petition offers a detailed breakdown of Discord's default configurations, presented as evidence of a deliberate gap between public safety commitments and actual product design.

Sensitive content filters operate across two categories - mature sexual media and graphic media. By default, Discord blurs such content in direct messages from friends and in servers for users with self-reported teen status, while blocking it only in direct messages from non-friends. The petition argues this falls far short of maximum restriction, which remains opt-in.

Friend request settings are pre-configured to allow requests from everyone, friends of friends, and server members simultaneously. A user must navigate into privacy settings and affirmatively disable each option. Discord chose the least protective default and left the correction burden on users.

Social permissions govern who may contact a user by direct message after joining a server. This feature matters because, according to the petition, the most common grooming pathway involves a bad actor joining a server frequented by a minor, establishing minimal contact in public channels, and then moving into a direct message. The direct message option is enabled by default. Discord has not changed it.

Direct message spam filters operate in a three-tier system: filter all, filter from non-friends, or do not filter. Discord defaults to the middle tier rather than the most protective option.

AutoMod - Discord's automated moderation tool capable of filtering keywords, blocking links, detecting raids, and controlling spam - is disabled by default on every new server. Each server owner must configure it manually. The petition notes the median Discord server has approximately 100 members and is operated by a hobbyist with no moderation training. The de facto default state for the majority of Discord's servers is, according to the filing, "nothing automated, one overworked volunteer moderator, and a report button that feeds into a queue."

Server verification levels default to None (unrestricted) for private servers and Low (verified email only) for community servers. The petition calls these delay mechanisms rather than security measures, noting that bad actors can create a new, legitimate-looking account in minutes and verify it with a burner email or phone number.

Age-restricted channels rest entirely on a self-reported birthdate entered at account creation. Discord has no mechanism to validate birthdates. A minor who enters a false age accesses every age-restricted channel without restriction.

Activity alerts - which notify eligible members of unusual activity - are off by default on private servers. Regular members receive no notification and have no visibility into unusual activity.

Moderation outsourced to unpaid volunteers

Discord's community moderation model comes under sustained attack in the petition. The filing states that Discord transfers responsibility for platform safety to volunteer moderators who receive no training from Discord, no minimum competency requirements, no psychological support, no liability protection, no compensation, no meaningful authority beyond their own server, and no escalation pathways that guarantee timely responses from Discord.

According to the petition, Discord refers to this arrangement as "empowering community leaders." The filing characterises it differently: Discord offloads safety responsibility to unpaid, unqualified volunteers while retaining the commercial and reputational benefit of appearing to have a working moderation infrastructure.

Discord's Moderator Academy - its only training resource - is voluntary, uncompensated, and advisory in nature. It is not referenced during server creation and is not required to create or operate a server accessible to children. On June 3, 2022, Discord published an article titled "Understanding and Avoiding Moderator Burnout," which the petition characterises as an admission that the company knew its safety model placed unsustainable demands on the unpaid volunteers it had designated as its primary line of defense.

The petition further highlights a passage from Discord's own published Moderator Guidelines, bolded in the original document, instructing that "moderators should use their own judgment to enforce rules only when it makes sense and not blindly following the letter of the law." Discord wrote and published that guidance. The filing calls this a safety system.

Discord dedicates 15% of its entire workforce to safety operations and engineering, according to language cited in the petition. The filing notes that safety is simultaneously described as "at the core of everything we do" and "a primary area of investment as a business" - yet the numbers and structural decisions tell a different story.

The block button was buried

Even Discord's reporting and blocking features are examined for design choices that the petition argues systematically disadvantage protective action. The "Add friend" button appears in Discord's signature brand color, "Report spam" appears in red, while the "Block" feature is visually de-emphasized and positioned between two other options.

After a user submits a report, the post-report interface presents "Ignore" as the first actionable option. The "Block" option appears only if the user scrolls past "Ignore." When a user does block another, Discord displays two prompts inviting them to unblock, and frames the protection as a restriction: "You cannot send messages to a user you have blocked" - rather than confirming that the blocked user can no longer contact them.

The violation record

The petition documents the human consequences with specificity. A 13-year-old Texas girl was sexually assaulted in her home by a predator who groomed her on Discord over several years. A 15-year-old autistic boy was coerced into sending explicit photos through Discord's messaging system and later died by suicide. A 13-year-old in Washington died by suicide in January 2022 after being targeted by the "764" extremist network, which operated openly on Discord servers.

NBC News identified 35 cases over six years in which adults were prosecuted for kidnapping, grooming, or sexual assault involving Discord communications. An additional 165 cases involved the transmission or receipt of child sexual abuse material through Discord. Reports of CSAM on Discord increased 474% from 2021 to 2022 alone. Since the platform's launch in 2015, a National Investigative Unit analysis of thousands of federal court records found that 60% of cases identified were criminal investigations or actions involving Discord, and nearly half of those involved child exploitation.

In May 2025, the FBI launched an investigation into the "764" extremist and child-exploitation network that originated on Discord. FBI Assistant Director David Scott described the international criminal enterprise as "one of the most disturbing things we're seeing." The FBI has opened 250 investigations tied to that network alone.

A 2025 data breach exposed the sensitive personal identifying information of approximately 70,000 users who had submitted government-issued identification - driver's licenses and passports - in response to Discord's own age-verification requirement.

Discord was last valued at $15 billion in its 2021 funding round and generated an estimated $879 million in annual revenue in 2024, serving over 200 million monthly active users, according to the petition's financial section.

The Texas action did not emerge in isolation. In April 2025, New Jersey sued Discord for misleading parents about its safety features, failing to enforce minimum age requirements, and exposing minors to sexual predators in violation of the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act. In May 2026, Nevada sued Discord, finding that its lack of age verification and hands-off approach to moderation had made Discord "the go-to chat option for child abusers." That same month, Indiana sued Discord following the death of a 17-year-old who was lured to her death by a predator after extensive on-platform communication. The Indiana Attorney General stated that Discord and similar platforms "know full well that numerous predatory sex criminals have used these platforms to contact and lure their victims." The Florida Attorney General opened a formal investigation, stating "many of our criminal investigations into internet child predators lead to one place: Discord."

In January 2024, Discord CEO and co-founder Jason Citron testified before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee at a hearing titled "Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis." Discord did not appear voluntarily. The Committee subpoenaed Citron and enlisted the U.S. Marshals Service to serve the subpoena after Discord refused to accept service.

In December 2024, the Texas Office of the Attorney General launched a formal investigation into Discord's privacy practices for minors under the SCOPE Act and TDPSA - the same statutes underlying the current lawsuit. Discord had direct notice from Texas before this petition was filed.

In April 2025, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York described Discord in open court as "a hunting ground to find, manipulate and sextort our most vulnerable."

Discord has appeared on the National Center for Sexual Exploitation's Dirty Dozen List for five consecutive years for its continued failure to adequately address sexually exploitative content and activity on its platform.

The October 2025 investigation expansion

The current lawsuit traces back to October 9, 2025, when Paxton expanded his SCOPE Act investigation into Discord following reports that the platform had been used by the assassin who murdered Charlie Kirk, and following broader allegations about addiction and exposure of minors to sexual exploitation and extremist content. At that point, Paxton issued an expanded Civil Investigative Demand focused on extremist content, sexual exploitation of minors by grooming gangs, shooters carrying out acts of extremist violence, and platform addictiveness. Texas also launched simultaneous investigations into other platforms including Character.AI, Reddit, and Instagram for children's privacy and safety practices.

Why this matters for the marketing and technology community

The Discord lawsuit is part of a broader pattern of state-level enforcement that directly affects how platforms handle minors' data and the advertising ecosystem built around them. New COPPA rules that took effect in June 2025 required separate consent for third-party data sharing and stricter data retention for child-directed services. The FTC separately issued guidance on age verification technology and COPPA enforcement shields. The IAB raised concerns in March 2024 about FTC COPPA proposals and their effect on children's online access.

Platforms that carry advertising directed at broad demographics - including teen and family audiences - face growing legal exposure as state attorneys general use consumer protection statutes to reach beyond data privacy into product design and safety defaults. The Texas case is specifically brought under the DTPA, not merely a privacy law, which widens the legal theory and the potential per-violation penalty exposure considerably.

The petition's technical documentation of Discord's default settings - each showing a deliberate choice to favour accessibility over protection - creates a roadmap that other states and regulators could apply to different platforms. The argument that safety-related defaults constitute deceptive trade practices under consumer protection law, rather than just a privacy violation, is a significant doctrinal expansion.

Discord had not publicly responded to the Texas petition by the time this article was filed.

Timeline

  • 2015 - Discord launches as a communication platform for gamers
  • June 3, 2022 - Discord publishes "Understanding and Avoiding Moderator Burnout," acknowledged in the Texas petition as an admission of systemic moderation strain
  • 2020 - FTC issues orders to Discord and eight other social media companies on children's data collection practices
  • January 2022 - A 13-year-old in Gig Harbor, Washington dies by suicide after being targeted by the "764" extremist network operating on Discord servers
  • January 2024 - Discord CEO Jason Citron is subpoenaed to testify before the US Senate Judiciary Committee on child sexual exploitation; the US Marshals Service serves the subpoena after Discord refused to accept service
  • March 17, 2024 - IAB raises concerns about proposed FTC COPPA rule changes and their impact on children's online access
  • December 12, 2024 - Texas AG Paxton launches investigations into Discord, Character.AI, Reddit, Instagram, and other companies under the SCOPE Act and TDPSA
  • April 2025 - New Jersey sues Discord, becoming the first state to file suit against the platform
  • April 2025 - Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York describe Discord in open court as "a hunting ground to find, manipulate and sextort our most vulnerable"
  • May 2025 - FBI launches investigation into the "764" extremist and child-exploitation network tied to Discord; 250 investigations opened
  • June 23, 2025 - New COPPA rules take effect requiring separate parental consent for third-party data sharing involving minors
  • October 9, 2025 - Texas AG Paxton expands SCOPE Act investigation into Discord following reports the platform was used by the assassin who murdered Charlie Kirk
  • February 25, 2026 - FTC issues COPPA policy statement on age verification technology
  • May 2026 - Nevada and Indiana attorneys general each file separate lawsuits against Discord
  • May 21, 2026 - Texas AG Paxton files lawsuit against Meta and WhatsApp for privacy deception
  • May 22, 2026 - Texas AG Paxton files landmark lawsuit against Discord in Collin County District Court under the DTPA, seeking up to $10,000 per violation, mandatory safety defaults, and SCOPE Act age verification compliance

Summary

Who: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, acting through the Consumer Protection Division of the Office of the Attorney General, as plaintiff; Discord, Inc., a Delaware corporation headquartered in San Francisco, as defendant.

What: A lawsuit filed in Collin County District Court under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, alleging Discord made false and deceptive representations about platform safety while knowingly allowing child predators, extremist networks, and sexually exploitative content to operate. The state seeks civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation, mandatory safety defaults, SCOPE Act age verification compliance, and disgorgement of unlawfully obtained revenue.

When: The lawsuit was filed on May 22, 2026. The underlying investigation began with an initial SCOPE Act probe in December 2024, expanded on October 9, 2025 following the Charlie Kirk murder, and culminated in the petition filed today.

Where: Collin County District Court, Texas. Discord is incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in San Francisco, California. Venue in Collin County was established because Discord serves consumers there and has been linked to violent online networks including "764" that targeted Texas youth.

Why: Texas alleges Discord chose, repeatedly and knowingly, to prioritise platform growth and user accessibility over child safety. Specific product design decisions cited include making safety settings opt-in rather than default, staffing critical safety functions with unpaid volunteers, expiring violations after 90 days, leaving private servers invisible to the platform, and burying the block button. These decisions, the state argues, were made while Discord publicly represented to parents, users, and regulators that safety was "at the core of everything we do" - representations Texas contends were false.

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