Telegram’s Durov piles on as Meta, Discord fight Texas lawsuits

WhatsApp and its parent company Meta (NASDAQ: META) have received lawsuits from the state of Texas regarding their privacy encryption. The company has been accused of violating the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act. 

Telegram’s founder, Pavel Durov did not miss the opportunity to pile on, writing the latest chapter in the long history of the rivalry with Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

WhatsApp encryption is a giant fraud.

The state of Texas just sued WhatsApp for lying to users about privacy — because WhatsApp employees have access to “virtually all” private messages.

Now we know what WhatsApp’s founder meant when he said he “sold his users’ privacy.”

— Pavel Durov (@durov) May 23, 2026

As Cryptopolitan reported in January, Durov joined Musk in punching holes in Meta’s case when an international group of plaintiffs claimed in a lawsuit filed in San Francisco that the Zuckerberg-led firm’s claims about WhatsApp’s chat encryption were false. 

What did Pavel Durov say about Meta’s lawsuit? 

The rivalry between Telegram founder Pavel Durov and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was reignited this week after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Meta and WhatsApp for allegedly lying about message encryption. 

The lawsuit, filed in Harrison County court, accuses Meta Platforms Inc. and its subsidiary WhatsApp LLC of violating the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act (DTPA) by falsely promising users that their messages are protected by end-to-end encryption. 

Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, responded to the lawsuit calling WhatsApp’s encryption a “giant fraud” in a post on X (formerly Twitter). He wrote that WhatsApp employees have access to “virtually all” personal messages sent.

“We now understand what WhatsApp’s creator meant when he said ‘I sell my users’ privacy,” Durov said in a Telegram channel post. He also used the moment to encourage users to switch to Telegram instead.

Durov has repeatedly accused Meta of mishandling user data since it bought WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014. Just weeks before the Texas lawsuit, Durov had already warned that WhatsApp’s encryption could be “the biggest scam in history,” claiming that WhatsApp reads user messages and shares data with third parties. 

Why did Texas also sue Discord?

Attorney General Paxton, who is also running a U.S. Senate campaign, had time to aim at one more tech company operating in Texas. On the same day Meta’s lawsuit was filed, Paxton filed a separate suit against Discord, accusing the platform of failing to protect children from predators.

Paxton’s lawsuit states that Discord lied to the public by claiming that safety was at the core of their operation and “fully integrated” into the company’s design process.

The Attorney General’s office claims that Discord rigged its settings to make every account set toward “maximum exposure” by default. They also claim that the company used unpaid volunteers for important safety functions and built a platform that federal prosecutors have described as “a hunting ground” for predators to find and manipulate children.

The lawsuit mentions specific incidents that happened in Texas to strengthen the case. Like one incident in which a 13-year-old girl was sexually assaulted in her home by a predator who groomed her on Discord over several years, and another in which a 15-year-old committed suicide after being forced to produce explicit material through Discord’s messaging system.

Paxton started investigating Discord in October 2025 after it was revealed that the platform was used by the assassin who murdered conservative commentator Charlie Kirk. There were also reports that the platform exposed minors to sexual exploitation. 

Nevada, Indiana, and New Jersey have also recently sued Discord, while Florida recently announced its own investigation in March 2026. 

Paxton wants the court to force Discord to change its default safety settings to be set to maximum protection for new accounts. He also wants age verification under the Texas SCOPE Act and civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation of the DTPA. 

Meta has so far denied all allegations in the WhatsApp lawsuit and pledged to fight it, with a spokesperson reiterating that the company cannot access people’s encrypted communications and any suggestion to the contrary is false. 

A Discord spokesperson said the platform has robust safety features and does not reflect the characterizations in the lawsuit.