Safety is a top priority at Discord and we are constantly working to ensure everyone on Discord is able to have meaningful online conversations and spend time with their communities in a safe, positive, and inclusive way.
As part of that work, we are participating in Safer Internet Day to demonstrate our commitment to internet safety and join forces with others to make the internet a better place.
Safer Internet Day was created by advocacy organizations as a way to raise awareness around online safety. It has since expanded into an opportunity for industry, government, and civil society to come together to share online safety and digital well-being best practices.
Making the internet a better, safer place for everyone is a tall task — and we know we can’t do it alone. Last year, as part of our ongoing partnership with the National Parent Teacher Association, we co-hosted an event featuring some of our teen moderators talking about belonging and mental health in online spaces. We’ve continued this partnership with the PTA Connected: Build up and Belong Program. This program helps families explore the use of technology as a communication and relationship tool, discusses ways to build belonging and positive communities in our digital world, teaches how to navigate privacy and safety on digital platforms, and helps families have interactive conversations about online scenarios, experiences and expectations.
We’re committed to helping build a safer internet on Safer Internet Day and beyond. To continue that mission, Discord has partnered with several international leaders in the online safety space.
This year, we’re teaming up with NoFiltr to help educate Discord users on the importance of safer internet practices to empower people to use Discord and other platforms in a smart and healthy manner. One of the ways we’ll be working together is by engaging with NoFiltr’s Youth Innovation Council to co-develop educational resources that connect to users where they are.
For this year’s Safer Internet Day, Discord and NoFiltr, with help from the Youth Innovation Council, are launching the “What’s Your Online Digital Role?” quiz. We believe that everyone can play a part in helping make online communities a safe and inclusive space, and this interactive quiz can help you figure out what role best suits you when it comes to being a part of and building a safe community. Take the quiz here to find out.
Discord is partnering with Childnet UK and Internet Sans Crainte, two European Safer Internet Centers dedicated to increasing awareness and education about better online safety practices for youth.
In addition, we’ll be hosting a roundtable event in Brussels where policymakers, civil society thought leaders, and industry partners will come together to share insights, discuss challenges, and discuss steps we can take together to make Discord and the internet a safer place for young people.
We also wanted to provide materials and tools that everyone can use to help facilitate healthy and open conversation about online safety — it’s not so easy approaching difficult or sensitive topics when it comes to talking about your experiences online.
To help kick start these important discussions in a more approachable way, we’ve made a print-at-home fortune teller filled with questions and icebreaker prompts that can help you lead a conversation about better digital health and safer online practices.
Interested in your own Safer Internet Day fortune teller? Check out our Safer Internet Day home page on Discord’s Safety Center, where you can print out and assemble your very own fortune teller.
We’ll be showcasing how to use this resource with our communities as part of our Safer Internet Day celebration.
We’ll be celebrating Safer Internet Day in the publicly-joinable Discord Town Hall server with an event all about Safety, including a walk-through of the fortune teller activity. You can join Discord official Town Hall server for the event happening on February 7th, 2023.
At Discord, we are deeply committed to helping communities thrive on our platform. Our teams are always working to make Discord an even more accessible and welcoming place to hang out online with your friends and build your community. Here are a couple of safety highlights from the last year:
In June, we debuted our new automated moderation tool, AutoMod, for community owners and admins looking for an easier way to keep communities and conversations welcoming and to empower them to better handle bad actors who distribute malicious language, harmful scams or links, and spam.
Today, AutoMod is hard at work in over 390,000 servers, reducing the workload for thousands of community moderators everywhere. So far, we’ve removed over 20 million unwanted messages — that’s 20 million less actions keeping moderators away from actually enjoying and participating in the servers they tend to. Check out our AutoMod blog post if you’re interested in getting AutoMod up and running in your community.
Spam is a problem on Discord, and we treat this issue with the same level as any other problem that impacts your ability to talk and hang out on Discord. That’s why this year, we’ve increased the amount of time and resources into refining our policies and operational procedures to more efficiently and accurately target bad actors. We’ve had over 140 million spam takedowns in 2022, and we’ll continue to remove spam from our platform in the future. Read more about Discord’s efforts to combat spam on our platform here.
Wanna learn more about online safety? How you can keep yourself and others safer online? We’ve gathered these resources to help give you a head start:
.svg)
