Discord is facing a new lawsuit from the state of New Jersey, which claims that the chat app is engaged in “deceptive and unconscionable business practices” that put its younger users in danger.
The lawsuit, filed on Thursday, comes after a multiyear investigation by the New Jersey Office of Attorney General. The AG’s office claims it has uncovered evidence that, despite Discord’s policies to protect children and teens, the popular messaging app is putting youth “at risk.”
“We’re the first state in the country to sue Discord,” Attorney General Matthew Platkin tells WIRED.
Platkin says there were two catalysts for the investigation. One is personal: A few years ago, a family friend came to Platkin, astonished that his 10-year-old son was able to sign up for Discord, despite the platform forbidding children under 13 from registering.
The second was the mass-shooting in Buffalo, in neighboring New York. The perpetrator used Discord as his personal diary in the lead-up to the attack and livestreamed the carnage directly to the chat and video app. (The footage was quickly removed.)
“These companies have consistently, knowingly, put profit ahead of the interest and well-being of our children,” Platkin says.
The AG’s office claims in the lawsuit that Discord violated the state’s Consumer Fraud Act. The allegations, which were filed on Thursday morning, turn on a set of policies adopted by Discord to keep children younger than 13 off the platform and to keep teenagers safe from sexual exploitation and violent content. The lawsuit is just the latest in a growing list of litigation from states against major social media firms—litigation that has, thus far, proven fairly ineffective.
Discord’s child and teen safety policies are clear: Children under 13 are forbidden from the messaging app, while it more broadly forbids any sexual interaction with minors, including youth “self-endangerment.” It further has algorithmic filters operating to stop unwanted sexual direct messages. The California-based company’s safety policy, published in 2023, states, “We built Discord to be different and work relentlessly to make it a fun and safe space for teens.”
But New Jersey says “Discord’s promises fell, and continue to fall, flat.”
The attorney general points out that Discord has three levels of safety to prevent youth from unwanted and exploitative messages from adults: “Keep me safe,” where the platform scans all messages into a user’s inbox; “my friends are nice,” where it does not scan messages from friends; and “do not scan,” where it scans no messages.
Even for teenage users, the lawsuit alleges, the platform defaults to “my friends are nice.” The attorney general claims this is an intentional design that represents a threat to younger users. The lawsuit also alleges that Discord is failing by not conducting age verification to prevent children under 13 from signing up for the service.
In 2023, Discord added new filters to detect and block unwanted sexual content, but the AG’s office says the company should have enabled the “keep my safe” option by default.
“Consider me unimpressed by their PR campaign,” Platkin says. He contends that the new features are insufficient and easy to get around, and they are less than what the company has made available to users in other countries. “If you put lipstick on a pig,” he says, “it’s still a pig.”
Discord responded to WIRED’s requests for comment after this story was published, writing that the company is “proud” of their efforts to protect children on their platform, and insists that they dispute the claims made in the lawsuit. “Given our engagement with the Attorney General’s office, we are surprised by the announcement that New Jersey has filed an action against Discord today,” the statement reads.
“Together, these open design features and default settings make it so that anyone can gain direct, private access to a child user with just a few clicks,” the filings allege. Later, the AG goes further, writing that “Discord promised parents safety but made deliberate choices to design its Application and establish default settings that rendered those promises utterly meaningless.”
The lawsuit lists a half-dozen criminal cases where adults allegedly used Discord to lure and exploited children, including the case of 764, a digital far-right pedophile ring.
The lawsuit proposes several different remedies, including a court injunction requiring that Discord improve its safety features and possible financial penalties if it’s found to be failing to keep its users safe.
While this appears to be the first state-level lawsuit against Discord, a number of private law firms have taken aim at the company on similar grounds. In 2022, the family of a then-11-year-old girl filed a class action lawsuit against Discord, alleging that the platform failed to implement enough safeguards to prevent her exploitation by other users. A similar case was filed in California earlier this year. Both cases are ongoing.
But these lawsuits are growing more and more common: Meta, in particular, is facing two massive lawsuits, led by dozens of states, claiming it harmed its teenage users. A similar lawsuit was filed by a coalition of school boards in the Canadian province of Ontario. The European Union, meanwhile, has crafted a suite of regulations meant to tackle these externalities—but, thus far, it is having trouble getting the American tech giants to comply.
Platkin has filed a number of other lawsuits—most recently against TikTok—in an attempt to force social media giants to improve their child protection measures.
“They can’t knowingly put out a product that’s unsafe for kids,” Platkin says. “I don’t care if you’re a social media company, or an opioid manufacturer or any other company that’s telling the public your product is safe when it’s not. We’re going to hold the company accountable.”
Platkin says he’s hopeful that the Trump administration, which has indicated some willingness to go after major social media companies, is interested in keeping children safe—not just targeting supposed conservative censorship. “Hope springs eternal for me,” Platkin says.
Updated at 3:05 pm ET: Added comment from Discord.
