Discord ordered to protect children from online predators

AUSTIN (KETK) — The popular social messaging app Discord has been handed a 90-day deadline to assure the protection of Texas children after Attorney General Ken Paxton secured a court order on Thursday demanding the app add safety parameters for children.

The court hearings come after the Texas attorney general’s office started an investigation into the app in Oct. 2025 due to reports that the platform is “addictive” and has allegedly exposed minors to sexual exploitation and extremist content. Paxton sued the online platform in May 2026, claiming that the tech company was deceiving users about the platform’s safety.

Nearly 500,000 reports of suspected child exploitation on Discord were submitted to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in 2025 alone, according to the Texas Attorney General’s Office.

Currently in the United States, users under 13 are prohibited from using Discord according to the company’s own policies, but Paxton claims that they have no way of actually knowing how many of the 200 million monthly active users are teenagers, or how many adults are posing as teenagers. More than 90% of users are never asked to confirm their age, the attorney general’s office said.

“Discord built a platform where adult predators could hunt Texas children, then looked parents in the eye and told them it was safe,” Attorney General 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.”

According to Paxton’s office, Discord announced in February 2026 that it would roll our protections for children worldwide after facing a legal deadline in the United Kingdom. Discord, however, delayed the rollout until the second half of 2026.

After a two-day evidentiary hearing that included the testimony from four Texas parents whose children experienced abuse or exploitation, the court ordered a temporary injunction which orders Discord to extend its existing safety features in the United Kingdom to Texas within the next 90 days.

Under the order, Discord must implement the following:

“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.”
“Close adult-only spaces to anyone it has not age-assured.”

Additionally, Discord must report its progress on the protections to the Office of the Attorney General every 30 days. The judge’s order will stand until a final judgment is reached in the trial.