Attorney General Ken Paxton has secured a temporary injunction against Discord, a popular social messaging app, following his investigation into predatory behavior towards minors on the platform.
Discord provides users with the ability to create “servers” in which any user can join with an invite and chat. The injunction notes that children in the United Kingdom are protected from predators through Discord’s same-age assurance and default safety protections.
Now, Discord must activate these protections for Texas children within 90 days.
“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,” according to Paxton’s office. “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.”
The TI comes after Paxton filed a lawsuit against Discord in May, alleging that the platform threatens child safety and provides a “hunting ground” for child predators as well as hosting explicit material.
The suit alleged that the messaging app violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act by falsely marketing Discord as safe for children.
According to data cited by the attorney general’s office, in 2025 alone, Discord submitted 489,782 reports of suspected child sexual exploitation on the platform, amounting to over 1,300 incidents per day.
While Discord claims that it does not allow children under the age of 13 to join, a Texas mother identified her 11-year-old son’s account and demanded that Discord delete it. Ten months later, an assistant attorney general logged into her son’s still active account in the courtroom.
Discord implemented enhanced child protection measures in the UK to comply with a law that was passed. The company stated that it would also roll out the same protections worldwide in 2026. However, when the features were supposedly a few weeks from launch, Discord pushed the release date to the second half of 2026. When asked under oath regarding that target launch date, Discord officials said it could not commit to it.
“Discord built a platform where adult predators could hunt Texas children, then looked parents in the eye and told them it was safe,” stated 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.”
The temporary injunction requires Discord to use its UK‑style age‑assurance system so that only verified adults can access sensitive or adult‑only content and spaces, while teens receive locked‑down default protections. The case will proceed while the protections go into effect.
