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 control over 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.

We know it’s important for users to understand what controls they have over their experience on Discord and how to be safer. Part of delivering a better, safer experience is making sure people don’t see content they don’t want to – whether that’s intrusive spam or unwanted sensitive media. This article covers settings that can help reduce the amount of unwanted content you see on Discord and promote a safer environment for everyone.

These settings can be controlled by going into User Settings and selecting the Privacy & Safety section.

Sensitive media

At any time, you can further configure personal settings to blur or block content in DMs that may be sensitive. The “blur” option in our sensitive content filters applies to all historic and new media. For teen users, Discord will blur media that may be sensitive in direct messages (DMs) and group direct messages (GDMs) from friends, as well as in servers. Adults can opt into these filters by changing their sensitive media preferences in Privacy & Safety Settings. Learn more about how to do this here. For all users, the default configuration is “block” for direct messages (DMs) and group direct messages (GDMs) from non-friends.

At any time, you can also block the user responsible and report the content that violates our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service.

DM spam filter

Automatically send direct messages that may contain spam into a separate spam inbox.

These filters are customizable and you can choose to turn them off. By default, these filters are set to “Filter direct messages from non-friends.” Choose “Filter all direct messages” if you want all direct messages that you receive to be filtered, or select “Do not filter direct messages” to turn these filters off.

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, selecting the Privacy & Safety section, and finding the "Server Privacy Defaults" heading.
• 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. When you toggle this setting off, you will be prompted to choose if you would like to apply this change to all of your teen’s existing servers. If you click "No," this change will only affect new servers your teen joins, and you will need to adjust the DM settings individually for each server that they have previously joined (in Privacy 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 the Friend Requests section.
• Users should only accept friend requests from users that they know and trust. If your teen isn’t sure, there’s no harm in rejecting the friend request. They can always add that user later if it’s a mistake.

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

• Everyone - Selecting this means that anyone who knows your teen's Discord Tag or is in a mutual server with your teen can send your teen a friend request. This is handy if your teen doesn’t share servers with someone that introduced them to Discord and your teen wants to let them send a friend request with just your teen's Discord Tag.
• Friends of Friends - Selecting only this option means that for anyone to send your teen a friend request, they must have at least one mutual friend with your teen. 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 your teen can send your teen a friend request. Deselecting this while "Friends of Friends" is selected means that your teen can only be sent a friend request by someone with a mutual friend.

If you don’t want your teen to receive ANY friend requests, you can deselect all three options. However, your teen can still send out friend 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 teen's Friends List, prevents them from messaging your teen directly, and hides their messages in any shared servers.

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

If your teen has blocked a user but that user creates 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

If you or your teen would like to delete your teen’s Discord account, please follow the steps described in this article. Please note that we are unable to delete an account by request from someone other than the account owner.