This is the pattern now. Age verification laws are the vehicle through which governments are dismantling anonymous access to the internet and they’re doing it one platform at a time, one state at a time, always framed as protecting children.
More than 25 US states now require age checks to access some form of online content. The Supreme Court upheld Texas’s age verification law for adult websites last year.
The EU is rolling out its Digital Identity Wallet by the end of 2026. Australia banned under-16s from social media entirely. Discord is just the latest target.
“Discord has allowed and invited all kinds of nihilistic violence and evil,” Paxton said. “We live in a time where the dangers children face online have never been greater, and every parent in Texas deserves to know their child is protected.”
Paxton filed the lawsuit in Collin County state district court, part of a burst of tech company litigation from his office ahead of his US Senate GOP runoff against John Cornyn, which he won yesterday.
We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.
Earlier this year and last, his office has gone after Snapchat, TikTok, and Roblox on similar grounds. Texas joins Nevada, Indiana, and New Jersey in suing Discord specifically, with Florida investigating separately.
The filing paints a bleak picture of how Discord operates.
According to the lawsuit, the platform defaulted every account setting toward maximum exposure, staffed critical safety functions with unpaid volunteer moderators who had little training or support, let user violations expire from the record after 90 days, and buried its safety tools where most people would never find them.
Federal prosecutors have separately described Discord’s architecture as “a hunting ground to find, manipulate and sextort our most vulnerable.”
The state cites specific cases like a 13-year-old Texas girl was groomed on the platform for several years before being sexually assaulted in her home. A 15-year-old boy was coerced into producing explicit material through Discord’s messaging system and later died by suicide. A 13-year-old in Washington state died by suicide after being targeted by the extremist “764” network operating on Discord servers.
Discord responded by saying, “the lawsuit’s characterization of Discord does not reflect the platform we have built or the investments we have made in user safety.
“We look forward to collaborating with policymakers in working toward a safer online experience for all users on Discord and across the internet.” The company notes that roughly 80% of its users are adults and that the service already requires users to be at least 13.
The SCOPE Act itself has been taking hits in court. A federal judge has blocked several of its provisions, including the age verification requirement, calling them unconstitutionally vague.
We already know what happens when platforms check identity documents for age verification, because Discord already demonstrated it.
On September 20, 2025, attackers compromised a support agent’s account at one of Discord’s outsourced customer service vendors and spent 58 hours inside the company’s support system. Discord confirmed that roughly 70,000 users had government-issued ID images exposed, driver’s licenses and passports that people had uploaded to verify their ages.
The hackers claimed the real numbers were far higher, pointing to over 520,000 age verification tickets in the system and alleging they had extracted 1.6 terabytes of data tied to 5.5 million unique users. Discord disputed the scale but acknowledged the breach.
Paxton has been filing lawsuits using whatever pieces of the law remain standing. The legislation passed the Texas House with overwhelming bipartisan support in 2023, designed to give parents more control over what their children see online and how platforms handle minors’ data. Its enforcement has been anything but smooth.
None of that stopped Paxton from asking a court to compel Discord specifically to implement SCOPE’s age verification requirements, along with defaulting all safety settings to maximum protection, paying back all revenue tied to unlawful conduct, and facing civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation.
The SCOPE Act’s approach assumes that the solution to bad behavior on the internet is removing the ability for anyone to be online without the government knowing who they are. That assumption is wrong, and building the infrastructure to enforce it will cause damage that long outlasts whatever safety improvements it produces.
