Discord Gets Sued Over Alleged Anti-Consumer Practices

Last week, messaging and communication platform Discord got hit with a class-action lawsuit over its alleged anti-consumer business practices, with the plaintiffs claiming that the platform has deliberately made canceling its Nitro subscriptions as challenging and counter-intuitive as possible.

First spotlighted by Lawyer Rob Freund, the lawsuit claims that Discord has violated California's Business and Professions Code by forcing users to jump through hoops to cancel their subscriptions. Referencing Section 17602 of the code, the allegation points out that there is no "prominently located direct link or button" in the user settings to facilitate subscription cancellation.

Instead, the lawsuit continues, "A user is required to navigate to the 'Subscriptions' tab within the user settings and then locate the small 'Cancel' button. After clicking the 'Cancel' button, Discord then presents the user with a series of prompts to click through in order to cancel the subscription, including prompts which are seemingly designed to convince the user to not cancel their subscription."

According to the plaintiffs, "This is hardly a 'timely and easy-to-use mechanism for cancellation,' nor a cancellation procedure that allows the consumer to cancel 'without engaging any further steps that obstruct or delay the consumer's ability to terminate the automatic renewal or continuous service immediately."

The lawsuit also highlighted the numerous YouTube tutorials on how to cancel Nitro as additional evidence of "Discord's cancellation flow" being "obfuscated."

Earlier this year, Adobe was sued by the US Department of Justice over the same issue, with allegations that the company has been harming its users by automatically enrolling them in its default subscription plan without clearly disclosing key terms related to the cancellation process, making it incredibly difficult to cancel. The lawsuit also accused Adobe of burying the key terms of its APM plan "in fine print and behind optional textboxes and hyperlinks," ensuring that most consumers would never notice them.

At the moment, Discord hasn't officially addressed the accusations on its social media pages or blog, so it remains to be seen whether the issue will be resolved at the state level or escalate and go federal, potentially involving the DOJ once again like in the Adobe case.

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