A Texas state court has ordered Discord age verification measures for users in the state, requiring the messaging platform to replicate the protections it already operates in the United Kingdom within 90 days, following a lawsuit brought under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act (DTPA).
Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the complaint against Discord on 22 May 2026, the same day a Collin County District Court issued an ex parte Temporary Restraining Order imposing immediate operational and marketing restrictions on the platform, according to the Texas Attorney General’s office. The agreed temporary injunction now replaces that order.
Discord does not admit wrongdoing. The underlying lawsuit proceeds towards trial in 2027.
What the Discord Age Verification Order Requires in Texas
Under the agreed injunction, Discord must route messages from strangers into a separate inbox, auto-block sensitive content for teenagers, and restrict access to adult spaces, all within the 90-day window for Texas-based users.
The platform must also introduce the same age-assurance process already in force in the UK. There, Discord uses either a video-selfie facial age estimation or a government ID scan, processed by vendor k-ID and its document verification partner Veratad. Discord states it never sees the ID or selfie, both are permanently deleted immediately after age is confirmed, and the ID is never linked to the Discord account.
The Texas AG’s office says Discord’s Senior Director of Product Policy acknowledged under oath that the company does ‘not currently’ confirm any American user’s age at signup, and agreed that Discord has the capability to make every safety change the state requested. The complaint alleges Discord falsely marketed itself as a platform where safety is ‘at the core of everything we do’ while designing features that made it easier for predators to identify and contact minors.
Texas seeks civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation, as well as disgorgement of revenues, as set out in the original DTPA complaint.
A Growing Pattern of State Enforcement
Texas is not acting in isolation. New Jersey was the first state to sue Discord, filing its action approximately fifteen months before Texas’s May 2026 complaint. Nevada, Indiana, and Arkansas have also brought proceedings against the platform.
The New Jersey action, filed by Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin and the Division of Consumer Affairs, alleges Discord violated the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act by misleading parents about the efficacy of its safety controls and obscuring risks children faced, including concerning the safety settings for direct messages.
Discord has 200 million monthly users, according to BBC reporting, giving the scale of any age-assurance rollout considerable operational weight.
The platform had already been moving, hesitantly, towards wider age verification before the Texas litigation accelerated matters. In February 2026, Discord announced it would delay the global rollout of its age verification system to the second half of 2026, having originally targeted March 2026. The company also said it was imposing stricter requirements on partners offering facial age estimation, requiring the process to be entirely on-device, and dropped partner Persona, which it said ‘did not meet that bar’.
The Texas injunction effectively forces the pace. Whether the agreed measures satisfy the court as the litigation moves towards its 2027 trial date (and whether other states extract comparable commitments) will determine how far the UK model becomes the de facto standard across American jurisdictions.
