Helping your teen stay safe on Discord

Over the years, Discord has designed tools to protect our users from inappropriate content or unwanted contact. Knowing how to use these tools will give you full control of your Discord experience and will help you avoid unwanted experiences. 

As a parent, we encourage you to spend some time reviewing and discussing your teen’s settings so that you can customize their Discord experience. More details on all our privacy and security tools can be found here.

Explicit media content settings

From this menu, users can decide whether they want Discord to automatically scan and delete direct messages that contain explicit media content. You can access this setting by going into User Settings and selecting Privacy & Safety and Safe Direct Messaging.

By default, this is set to “my friends are nice”, which means only DMs your teen receives from non-friends are scanned for explicit media. Choose ‘Keep me safe’ to have all DMs you receive scanned for explicit media.

mceclip0.png

Direct message (DM) settings
  • This menu lets users determine who can contact them in a DM. You can access this setting by going into User Settings and selecting Privacy & Safety and Server Privacy Default.
  • By default, whenever your teen is in a server, anyone in that server can send them a DM.
  • You can disable the ability for anyone in a server with your teen to send your teen a DM by toggling “Allow direct messages from server members” to off. This will only affect new servers your teen joins. You will need to adjust the DM settings individually for each server that they have previously joined (in Server Settings on the server’s dropdown list).

You can also control these settings on a server-by-server basis.

Friend request settings
  • This menu lets you determine who can send your teen a friend request on Discord. You can access this setting by going into User Settings and selecting Privacy & Safety and Who Can Add You As A Friend.
  • Users should only accept friend requests from users that you know and trust. If your teen isn’t sure, there’s no harm in rejecting the friend request. They can always add them later if it’s a mistake.

mceclip0.png

You can choose from the following options when deciding who can send you a friend request.

  • Everyone - Selecting this means that anyone who knows your Discord Tag or is in a mutual server with you can send you a friend request. This is handy if you don’t share servers with someone that introduced you to Discord and you want to let them friend you with just your Discord Tag.
  • Friends of Friends - Selecting this means that for anyone to send you a friend request, they must have at least one mutual friend with you. You can view this in their user profile by clicking the Mutual Friends tab next to the Mutual Servers tab.
  • Server Members - Selecting this means users who share a server with you can send you a friend request. Deselecting this means that you can only be added by someone with a mutual friend.

If you don’t want your teen to be open to ANY requests, you can deselect all three options. However, your teen can still send out requests to other people.

Blocking

If someone is bothering your teen, you always have the option to block the user. Blocking on Discord removes the user from your Friends List, prevents them from messaging your teen directly, and hides their messages in any shared servers.

To block someone, they can simply click on their @username and select Block. 

mceclip1.png

If your teen has blocked a user but they create a new account to try and contact them, please report the user to the Trust & Safety team. You can learn more about how to do this at this link.

Deleting an account

As long as you have the username and password for an account, you can delete your teen’s Discord account at any time. If you can’t access the Discord account directly, please submit a request using this form and our Trust and Safety team will do our best to help.