Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has sued Discord, the chat and gaming platform, accusing the company of telling families its app was safe while leaving children open to contact from adult predators.
The 65-page complaint was filed Thursday, Oct. 15, in Glades County, part of the 20th Judicial Circuit in Southwest Florida, according to Courthouse News Service and WGCU. Uthmeier announced the case at a news conference in Tampa, joined by Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office deputies, a Hillsborough County School Board member and a representative of the Florida Department of Health.
What the state claims
The attorney general's office says Discord has never required age verification, so an adult can sign up as a teenager with an email address and a birth date. The office says the platform's default settings for years let strangers send friend requests and messages to children, and that Discord still does not scan every private chat for violations of its own rules.
The suit brings five claims: violations of the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act and of the state law on children's data in online spaces, plus negligence, negligent misrepresentation and public nuisance.
The state is asking the court to:
- bar the practices it describes, including running the app without real age checks and collecting children's data without a parent's consent;
- impose civil penalties of up to $10,000 for each willful violation of the deceptive practices law, and up to $50,000 for each violation of the children's data law, rising to $150,000 when Discord knew the user was under 18;
- order restitution to consumers, damages and the cost of abating the alleged nuisance, plus attorney's fees.
"We've arrested more than 2,100 child predators in this state since I took office," Uthmeier said in the office's announcement. "Again and again, their trail to our kids leads back to Discord."
The case grew out of an investigation the office opened in March, which included subpoenas to the company. Discord announced new teen safety settings on Sept. 22; the lawsuit calls those changes too little, too late. At the Tampa event, Uthmeier said the company had made "some positive changes, but not enough," Courthouse News reported.
