AUSTIN — Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office has secured an agreed temporary injunction against Discord requiring the platform to extend age-assurance and default safety protections already in place for its United Kingdom users to Texas children, according to a release from the Attorney General’s office.
Under the order, Discord has 90 days to activate the protections for every Texas user, the release states. The company must route messages from strangers into a separate request inbox, block sensitive content for Texas teens unless it confirms the user is an adult, and close adult-only spaces to anyone it has not age-verified. Discord must also report its progress to the Attorney General’s office every 30 days, and the order remains binding until final judgment and is enforceable by contempt, according to the release.
The Attorney General’s office said the order followed a two-day evidentiary hearing in which the office argued Discord’s platform lacked meaningful age verification, allowing users to create accounts with only an email address and a self-reported birthday. According to the office’s account of the hearing, a Texas investigator posing as a 13-year-old girl was contacted by a stranger within moments of creating an account, and the office alleges the stranger solicited the account for explicit sexual acts within thirty seconds. The office’s release states that Discord submitted 489,782 reports of suspected child sexual exploitation on its platform to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in 2025 alone.
The release states that a parent testified during the hearing about abuse her child suffered on the platform at the hands of an individual now serving a life sentence in federal prison; the office did not name the child in its account. The Attorney General’s office also said a parent testified she had asked Discord in July 2025 to delete her 11-year-old son’s account, and that the account remained active ten months later. According to the release, Discord’s Senior Director of Product Policy testified the company does not currently verify the age of American users at signup, while acknowledging under oath that the company has the technical capability to implement the safety measures Texas requested.
Paxton, in a statement included in the release, said Discord built safety measures for children in Britain while denying the same protections to children in Texas, adding that his office “forced Discord to turn those protections on for every Texas child” and pledging to continue pursuing platforms he says put children at risk.
The release notes Texas is not the first state to sue Discord, pointing to prior litigation filed by New Jersey, Nevada, Indiana, and Arkansas. According to the Attorney General’s office, Texas filed its lawsuit on May 22, 2026, obtained a temporary restraining order, and secured the temporary injunction seven weeks later.
The case is ongoing. A temporary injunction is an interim court order rather than a final ruling, and the release states the matter now proceeds to trial, where the Attorney General’s office says it will seek civil penalties against Discord under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
Discord’s response to the allegations was not included in the Attorney General’s release.
