.png)
.svg)
Today is the 21st annual Safer Internet Day. That means at the prime age of 21, the annual online celebration that helps raise awareness around internet safety is older than many folks who hang out online with their friends on a daily basis! A lot has changed about how the internet impacts our daily lives in all those years — let’s talk about how we’re celebrating the work being done around the globe to make a difference.
The motto for Safer Internet Day is “together for a better internet.” At Discord, we’re constantly working to make our platform the best place for our users, including teens, to hang out online.
If we want to do this right, we need to ensure people’s voices are heard, especially those of our younger users. We have to engage with youth directly to hear their firsthand experiences and perspectives on how to shape features to meet their needs. That’s why we’re working closely with organizations and teens from around the world to develop an aspirational charter that helps us understand how they want to feel on Discord, while informing the ways we build new products and features to keep them safe on the platform.
We’re consulting the clinical researchers at the Digital Wellness Lab and NoFiltr’s Youth Innovation Council, and engaging our own global focus groups to not only better understand how teens want to feel on Discord, but also what it takes to ensure they feel that way.
Based on our findings, we’ll then partner with teens to co-create a charter that outlines the rights teens have online and the best-case scenarios for authentically expressing themselves and hanging out with friends in digital spaces. While our Community Guidelines explain what isn’t allowed on Discord, these new principles will ultimately guide users to take on a shared responsibility in creating a fun and comfortable space to talk and hang out with their friends.
Recent focus groups have shown us that teens navigate privacy, safety, and authenticity in nuanced and sophisticated ways – and they expect online platforms to do the same. While our research is only getting started, our teen participants have already emphasized the importance of both transparency and respect on platforms in order to feel safe to be authentically themselves.
“Without privacy, the potential for trust is compromised, preventing the free exchange of ideas and hindering the development of a vibrant and supportive online community.” - NoFiltr’s Youth Innovation Council Member, 14
In the spirit of trust and transparency that teens yearn for, we’ll continue to share our processes of developing this charter openly on our Safety Center.
Along with our work on the charter, we’re also partnering with technology non-profit Thorn to build a set of product features to protect and empower teens. Last fall, we announced our Teen Safety Assist initiative with safety alerts on senders and sensitive content filters, and we’re about to release our next feature: safety alerts in chat.
This new feature, which is enabled by default for teens, will give users additional protection to keep all their spaces comfy on Discord. When we detect a message is potentially unwanted, teen users will receive a safety alert in chat to offer protections like blocking or reporting the sender.
The safety alert in chat will include advice on how to tackle an unwanted situation. Teen users will be encouraged to take a break from the conversation, reach out to Crisis Text Line for live help, or visit NoFiltr.org for more resources and safety tips. The feature will start rolling out for English regions in the coming weeks.
Working together with organizations to make the internet a better, safer place is something we’re committed to doing on Safer Internet Day, and every other day of the year. Discord should be a place where everyone has a home to talk, have fun, and just be themselves — we’re here for you every step of the way.
If you want to learn more about how we approach safety and privacy here at Discord, we have plenty of more resources and articles throughout our Safety Center.
