Texas Is Standing Up to Big Tech

For years, Big Tech companies have told parents they are committed to keeping children safe online. Yet time and time again, we have seen a troubling gap between those promises and what children actually encounter on their platforms.

Texas is now making it clear that those empty promises will not be tolerated.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has secured a landmark court order requiring Discord to strengthen protections for Texas children and provide them with safeguards the company already provides to users in the United Kingdom. Under the agreed temporary injunction, Discord has 90 days to implement age-assurance and default safety protections for Texas users.

Discord has become an enormously popular platform, particularly among young people. But according to the Texas Attorney General's lawsuit, the company's assurances to parents that the platform was "safe by design" and "safe by default" did not match the protections actually provided to users.

Before the court order, Texas users, including children and adults, could create Discord accounts using little more than an email address and a self-reported birthday. The Attorney General's office argued this system was inadequate to keep children away from predators.

Children should not be expected to outsmart predators, algorithms, and corporations by themselves. Parents should not have to wonder whether a platform marketed as safe for their children has actually taken reasonable steps to protect them.

And companies should not be allowed to advertise themselves as safe while failing to implement meaningful safeguards.

The Discord case is not happening in isolation.

Texas has increasingly taken the lead in protecting minors from harmful online content and putting parents, not technology companies, in charge of decisions involving their children.

One major example is the state's age-verification law for pornography websites. Texas requires commercial pornography websites to verify users are adults before allowing access to sexually explicit material. The Fifth Circuit upheld the constitutionality of that requirement, and Texas has continued enforcing it.

Texas has also enacted the App Store Accountability Act, which requires app stores to verify users' age categories and establishes parental-consent requirements for minors downloading applications and making in-app purchases. The law recognizes that downloading an app can expose a child to contracts, data collection, tracking, communications, and potentially dangerous content.

The U.S. Supreme Court has allowed the Texas law to remain in effect while litigation continues, following a Fifth Circuit ruling allowing its implementation to proceed.

Texas' efforts to protect children online are encouraging, but there is still much work to be done.

Just last week, a federal appeals court blocked one portion of Texas' SCOPE Act dealing with platforms' obligations concerning harmful content, while leaving the law's age-verification requirement standing. The case demonstrates the continuing legal battle between states seeking greater protections for children and technology companies challenging those regulations.

Texas should continue leading the nation in holding Big Tech accountable, empowering parents, and ensuring children are not treated as collateral damage in the technology industry's pursuit of profit.

Texas Family Project will continue standing with parents, defending childhood innocence, and supporting every effort to make Texas the safest place to raise a family.