Our goal is to make Discord the best place to talk and hang out with friends online. And when we say “talk,” we mean it literally: at any given moment, millions of people across the globe are talking in voice or video calls on Discord.

We know that keeping your calls private is a big part of feeling secure online. At Discord, user privacy has always been one of our highest values and priorities.

At the same time, we rely on servers all over the world to deliver robust, low-latency voice and video calls. In fact, we regularly add additional server locations. As we continue to expand internationally, we do our best to protect your calls from prying eyes and ears, no matter where servers are located.

That’s why we are beginning to experiment with new encryption protocols and technologies for voice and video calls on Discord. These protocols would support best-in-class performance and large calls without quality degradation or additional latency.

End-to-end encryption is designed to allow only the participants in a call to decipher its contents. One of the protocols we’re experimenting with is called Messaging Layer Security, which we believe would allow us to deliver end-to-end encryption at scale. Intermediaries, including platforms like Discord, are unable to access the content of communications encrypted with end-to-end encryption. 

We’re starting to experiment and don’t yet know how or if these technologies will be deployed for our users, but we’ll be consulting with experts in the field along the way. As we recently explained, we don’t take a one-size-fits-all approach to different spaces and experiences on Discord. Our current encryption experiments do not apply to Stages, which are designed for a different type of communication and rely on different technical systems than those used for other calls. 

Privacy and safety are each core values at Discord. As we work to protect our users’ privacy, we’ll continue to invest heavily in safety features, technologies and systems.

As we experiment with encryption technologies over the coming months, we’ll be listening to feedback and iterating rapidly. Stay tuned.