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Nelly
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Parent’s Guide to Discord

Hi! I’m Marcella from Discord. I’m a mom of a teen who loves using Discord to connect with his friends while playing his favorite games online. As a parent, I want to answer some questions you might have about what it’s like for your teen to use Discord online. What is Discord? Is it safe? What steps can I take to protect my teen’s account from bad people or inappropriate content?

If you’ve found this blog post and have an urgent issue on Discord, please read below to take immediate action:
If you encounter anything that violates our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service, you can report the user or activity by sending an email to abuse@discordapp.com. This is for reporting abuse, bullying, harassment and other issues. Our global teams works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to quickly review things you report and take appropriate actions.
You or your teen can also take immediate action on Discord by blocking the user or leaving the offending server. This is especially helpful if your teen is being bullied, harassed or receiving inappropriate content and you want to do something quickly.
For general questions outside of violations to our community guidelines, please email support@discordapp.com.

First, you may be wondering — what exactly is Discord?

Discord is a free voice, video and text chat app for teens and adults ages 13 and up. It was created to bring people together through a love of gaming. Teens can access Discord via their PC, browser, or mobile phone. Once there, they can join a chat they’ve been invited to or they can create private servers and invite their friends to play and discuss games by voice, text or video. They can also message each other individually or in group chats with up to ten other friends.

Discord is different than other social platforms like Twitter or Reddit, in that people come to Discord to build private, invite-only groups. All conversations are opt-in, so anyone not interested in chatting have a variety of tools at their disposal:

  • Choose who can direct message you
  • Choose who can add you as a friend
  • Choose what servers you want to partake in
  • Choose whether or not to block another person
  • Choose whether or not to scan and delete direct messages with explicit content
  • Choose who can join your server
  • Choose security and verification levels on your server

Why Is My Kid Using Discord?

Most likely your teen is getting online to connect with friends, talk about games, play games together and discuss common interests. While the majority of the servers are small and limited to a few friends, there are some larger, more open servers so we encourage your teen to do some research for best practices on general internet safety.

Here is a resource for general tips on how to address online safety with your kids should you have any questions.

Second, is it Safe?

One of our big goals here is to make sure you know that our community is safe. Our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service outline our policies for how ALL users should act on Discord so that your teen knows what behavior is and isn’t okay. This goes for any of their friends too.

We’ve also designed our app to be super secure. We protect sensitive information — including contact information and conversations — from appearing in a public search. We’ve also designed features to protect everyone from inappropriate content or unwanted contact.

Third, what are the 3 key steps you can take to make sure your teen’s account is safe?

1. Have a good, strong password

Check in with your teen to make sure he/she follows these best practices as well as:

  • Use passwords that are hard to guess and different from passwords used on other websites. Use a combination of numbers, letters, and special characters like punctuation marks.
  • Don’t share their passwords with other people.

For an extra layer of security, you can turn on Two-Factor Authentication (2FA for short) to make sure that only he/she has the ability to log in. This layer requires a time-based password (usually on a second device, like a phone) in order for your teen to access their account.

Follow these steps to turn on 2FA:

  • Go to User Settings — -> My Account — -> check Enable Two-Factor Auth button. Here’s a help article for more detailed steps.

2. Set who can send your teen direct messages or friend requests

Your teen can customize who can send them direct messages per server or globally.

To block unwanted messages and friend requests, follow these steps:

  • User Settings -> Privacy & Safety → Turn off the “Allow direct messages from server members” option. You can go to this help article for more detailed steps.
  • In this same menu, under “Who can add you as a friend,” deselect “everyone” and “server members.”

3. Block inappropriate content

Discord has the ability to set an Explicit Content Filter that will automatically detect and delete images and uploads containing explicit and inappropriate content.

Follow these steps to turn this feature on:

  • User Settings -> Privacy & Safety → Check the “Keep Me Safe” box. Check out this help article for more details.

Hope That Helps!

We hope this guide was helpful. As a parent, I know I feel confident there are good steps I can take to make sure my teen is safe using Discord. I hope you do too. Feel free to reach out to us at support@discordapp.com and let us know if you have any other questions or concerns not covered in this guide, so we can address them.