Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing online messaging platform Discord, accusing the tech company of exposing children to predators using the service and deceiving users about the safety of the platform.
Paxton filed the lawsuit Friday in a Collin County state district court, the latest in a recent flurry of lawsuits by Paxton’s office against tech companies and other businesses ahead of his U.S. Senate GOP runoff against incumbent John Cornyn on Tuesday.
Texas joins Nevada, Indiana and New Jersey as states that have recently sued Discord. Florida announced its investigation of the company in March. Many private lawsuits have been filed in recent months, as well, largely from families accusing the messaging service of allowing children to be sexually abused or exploited while using Discord.
Paxton first opened an investigation into the messaging platform in 2024, along with several other tech companies, all broadly focused on user data privacy. Paxton announced last October, following the killing of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, that he would expand the investigation of Discord to include a focus on the sexual exploitation of minors and extremist content on the platform.
Discord is an online messaging service generally used by people to communicate while playing video games. It also includes chat functions and the ability for users to create topic-based servers. Paxton has sued other video game and social media platforms, like Snapchat, Tiktok and Roblox, in recent months over similar concerns that they are violating users’ data privacy and allowing their platforms to be used to exploit children.
“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.”
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In 2023, Texas lawmakers strengthened laws requiring social media platforms to protect minors from inappropriate content online. That legislation, called Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment (SCOPE) Act, is still fighting its way through the courts and parts have been blocked for being unconstitutionally vague.
Paxton has used the remaining provisions of the SCOPE Act to bring lawsuits against Discord and the other tech companies.
The lawsuit asks the courts to require Discord to implement age verification for all users under that law, the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act. The lawsuit also seeks for Discord to pay fines under the state Deceptive Trade Practices Act, arguing the company has misled users about the safety of the platform.
See here, here, and here for more on the SCOPE Act, for which the rulings against it are currently on appeal. On Thursday, Paxton had sued Meta over WhatsApp.
The lawsuit states WhatsApp is deceiving its users by claiming to offer “end-to-end encryption,” or a software that conceals the contents of a message to anyone, including the company, except to the sender and receiver. This follows Paxton’s lawsuit against Netflix, also over privacy issues, earlier this month and a recent settlement with smart TV maker LG electronics, all while he pursues the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in a heated runoff against incumbent John Cornyn.
“Texans deserve to know whether their private communications are indeed truly private,” Paxton wrote in a statement. “WhatsApp markets its services as secure and encrypted, but it does not deliver on those promises. I am suing to protect Texans’ privacy and ensure that WhatsApp by Meta does not mislead Texans by unlawfully accessing private conversations and data.”
For years, Meta has faced allegations and lawsuits that it can, in fact, view private messages sent on WhatsApp. The company, which acquired WhatsApp in 2014, has consistently denied the claims.
“WhatsApp cannot access people’s encrypted communications and any suggestion to the contrary is false,” Meta spokesperson Rachel Holland wrote in a statement responding to Paxton’s lawsuit Thursday. “We will fight this suit as we continue defending our strong record on protecting people’s messages.”
The lawsuit and a news release from Paxton’s office point to whistleblowers that claim Meta does have access to messages sent on the platform.
A federal Commerce Department investigation into Meta and WhatsApp was abruptly closed earlier this year after an agency investigator wrote in a memo that there was “no limit” to the type of WhatsApp messages that could be viewed by Meta, according to Bloomberg.
The lawsuit is being brought under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, the state’s consumer protection law. Paxton argued in the lawsuit that Meta and WhatsApp violated the law by consistently misleading users by claiming in marketing that their communications are encrypted.
The lawsuit, filed in a state district court in Harrison County, asks for a permanent injunction blocking the company from viewing users’ messages without their consent and a $10,000 fine for each violation of the consumer protection law.
As the story notes, this is not the state’s first lawsuit against Meta for various reasons, and there are many more lawsuits against that accursed company out there. While one should never trust anything Ken Paxton says or does, I have no problem with this as a concept; it will be interesting to see what the next AG does with all of this as a strategy.
You may have noticed that this lawsuit was filed in small rural Harrison County, which is not a place where Meta has an office. Paxton files a lot of these lawsuits in small red rural counties, because he wants and needs friendly judges for his expeditions. There’s always an angle, and in Paxton’s case a helping dose of hypocrisy.
The filings mark a striking departure from Paxton’s previous opposition to the practice. In a 2017 legal brief that Paxton wrote on behalf of 17 states, he urged the U.S. Supreme Court to crack down on forum shopping in federal courts. The practice, he wrote, “has the pernicious effect of reducing confidence in the fairness and neutrality of our Nation’s justice system.”
Paxton’s approach also subverts what the Legislature intended when it passed a law in the 1990s that required plaintiffs to file lawsuits in counties where a “substantial” part of the alleged violation took place, according to three legal experts. That was done at the behest of conservatives who felt trial lawyers were flocking to venues favorable to them to win big damage verdicts against businesses.
“It looks like the attorney general’s office is interested in engaging in litigation games that it would otherwise decry if the shoe were on the other foot,” said Michael Ariens, a professor at St. Mary’s University School of Law in San Antonio, who has studied laws regulating where lawsuits can be filed.
Neither of Paxton’s Republican predecessors, Gov. Greg Abbott and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, appears to have employed this strategy. ProPublica and the Tribune reviewed hundreds of cases filed outside of the state’s five large urban counties during their tenures. Each had a clear connection to the venue Abbott or Cornyn chose.
Neither Abbott nor Cornyn, who Paxton is trying to unseat, responded to requests for comment. Trump on Tuesday endorsed Paxton in the race.
Texas’ major consumer protection law gives the attorney general some flexibility with those cases despite the state’s broader restriction on forum shopping. The office does not have to prove that a substantial part of the events in a consumer protection case happened in the place where it files suit but can instead file in counties where a defendant has done business.
But Paxton has stretched the boundaries of that law, too, according to legal experts and to former staffers of the attorney general’s office who argued against him in court. Last year, for example, the attorney general filed a lawsuit against the gaming platform Roblox in King County, a ranching community of about 200 people east of Lubbock. Its key justification for selecting the tiny county was that residents there had internet access.
Paxton, who did not respond to requests for comment or to written questions, has not spoken publicly about his office’s decisions to file lawsuits in courts with little connection to the cases.
Of course he hasn’t. And note when he filed that brief – in 2017, when there were a flurry of lawsuits filed by blue states and progressive activists against the earliest depredations of the first Trump presidency. Now that Trump has installed a couple of zealot deadenders in places like Amarillo and Wichita Falls, it’s a different ballgame. That’s the federal level, where the forum shopping is more often done by ideological allies than by Paxton himself, but it’s the same kind of thing. It’s always OK when Ken Paxton and his buddies do it, just not when anyone else does.