Building a Safer Place for Teens to Hang Out

Work together to keep each other safe

We know mistakes happen and rules are accidentally broken. Our new Warning System includes multiple touchpoints so users can easily understand rule violations and the consequences. These touchpoints provide more transparency into Discord interventions, letting users know how their violation may impact their overall account standing and gives information for them to do better in the future.

We built this system so users can learn how to do better in the future and help keep all hangouts safe. 

• It starts with a DM - Users who break the rules will receive an in-app message directly from Discord letting them know they received either a warning or a violation, based on the severity of what happened and whether or not Discord has taken action. 
• Details are one click away - From that message, users will be guided to a detailed modal that, in many cases, will give details of the post that broke our rules, outline actions taken and/or account restrictions, and more info regarding the specific Discord policy or Community Guideline that was violated.
• All info is streamlined in your account standing - In Privacy & Safety settings, all information about past violations can be seen in the new “Account Standing” tab. A user’s account standing is determined based on any active violations and the severity of those violations.

Some violations are more serious than others, and we’ll take appropriate action depending on the severity of the violation. For example, we have and will continue to have a zero-tolerance policy towards violent extremism and content that sexualizes children.

The Warning System is built based on our teen-centric policies. This is a multi-year, focused effort to invest more deeply and holistically into our teen safety efforts. We incorporate teen-centric philosophies in how we enforce our policies, assess risks of new products with Safety by Design, and communicate our policies in an age-appropriate manner.

For the Warning System, this means that we consider how teens are growing, learning, and taking age-appropriate risks as they mature, and we give them more opportunities to learn from mistakes rather than punish them harshly.

The Warning System starts rolling out today in select regions. Stay tuned for many more updates to our Warning System in the future.

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For our server moderators and admins, we’ve recently expanded their safety toolkit with new features that allow them to proactively identify potentially unsafe activity, such as server raids and DM spam, and take swift actions as needed. 

• Activity Alerts and Security Actions: Activity Alerts notify moderators of a server of abnormal server behavior, particularly what could be massive raids or unusual DM activity. From there, they can investigate further and take action to protect their community as necessary. If it doesn’t seem like an issue, they can easily resolve the alert. Security Actions enable swift server lockdowns by surfacing useful tools quicker, such as temporarily halting new member joins or closing off DMs between non-friend server members.
• Members Page: We’ve reimagined the existing Members page, letting moderators view their members in a more organized way. The Members page now displays relevant safety information about their members like join date, account age, and safety-related flags that we call Signals (such as unusual DM activity or timed out users). We plan on continuing to develop and surface additional relevant Signals. This redesigned Members page appears in a more easily accessible spot above their server’s channel list. 

We began rolling these tools in September to Community Servers, and now we’re rolling them out to all servers.