Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has secured an agreed temporary injunction requiring Discord to extend the same age-assurance and default safety settings it uses in the United Kingdom to every Texas user of the platform within 90 days.
The order followed a two-day evidentiary hearing and came roughly seven weeks after Texas filed suit against the company on May 22, 2026, according to a July 24 press release announced by the Office of the Attorney General.
Under the injunction, 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. The company must report its progress to the attorney general’s office every 30 days. The order binds Discord until final judgment and is enforceable by contempt.
The attorney general’s office said that under current default settings, a Texas user can open a Discord account with only an email address and a self-reported birthday, and anyone on the platform can send a child a friend request or private message. According to the release, when a state investigator created an account posing as a 13-year-old girl, a stranger messaged her within moments and solicited her for explicit sexual acts within 30 seconds.
The release stated that Discord submitted 489,782 reports of suspected child sexual exploitation on its platform to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in 2025, more than 1,300 per day.
According to the attorney general’s office, Discord announced in February 2026 that it would roll its protections out worldwide, with a United States launch weeks away, then pulled back and said the rollout would wait until the second half of 2026. Under oath at the temporary injunction hearing, Discord would not commit to that timeline, the release said.
Four Texas parents testified during the hearing. One described abuse her child suffered on the platform at the hands of Charles Maitski, who the release said is now serving a life sentence in federal prison. She testified that “something so simple could have saved what happened” to her child.
Another parent testified that she emailed Discord in July 2025 identifying her 11-year-old son’s account and demanding its deletion. Ten months later, an assistant attorney general logged into the still-active account in the courtroom, according to the release.
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.”
The release stated that Discord testified it has 200 million monthly active users worldwide but 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.
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.” The company’s senior director of product policy acknowledged Discord does “not currently” confirm any American user’s age at signup and agreed the company has the capability to make the changes Texas sought, according to the release.
“Discord built a platform where adult predators could hunt Texas children, then looked parents in the eye and told them it was safe,” Paxton said. “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 release noted that New Jersey, Nevada, Indiana, and Arkansas have also sued Discord. The case now proceeds to trial, where Texas will seek civil penalties under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
Provided by Dallas Express
