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Hello Parents & Educators! We hope you and your students are settling into the new academic year. We know you all are doing your best to ensure continued education and socialization for your teens, whether it is in-person, online, or a hybrid of both.
Students already use Discord to hang out with friends and study together, play games and form new clubs or societies, and even meet new people with unique and shared interests. We'd like to show you how Discord can help your students reconnect with their school routine and community while staying safe.
The safety of your teens and students is one of our biggest priorities. Discord is a place where your teen can hang out and find belonging with friends, classmates, and community members. Many teams across Discord work together to ensure your teen finds belonging by building products and policies with safety by default. We do this through reactive (responding to reports quickly), proactive (identifying problems before they are raised to us), and preventative (education and external engagement) efforts. Our teams are constantly listening to your feedback and improving on our existing safety policies, tools, and settings.
We’ve discussed some of our reactive and proactive policy and enforcement work in previous blog posts, and we’re planning to do more around our preventative efforts, such as parent and educator resources.
We want you to feel equipped with the tools and resources to talk to your teens about online safety and understand what safety settings Discord already offers from trusted child safety partners. Check out our current and updated Safety Center’s Parent & Educator Resources:
We’re also partnering with child and family safety organizations to build more resources and improve our policies for the long-term. One of our close partners, ConnectSafely recently launched their Parent’s Guide to Discord.
Larry Magid, CEO of ConnectSafely states: "Parents are rightfully concerned about any media their kids are using, and the best way to make sure they're using it safely is to understand how it works and what kids can do to maximize their privacy, security, and safety. That's why ConnectSafely collaborated with Discord to offer a guide that walks parents through the basics and helps equip them to talk with their kids about the service and how they can use it safely."
We’re now making it easier for students to find and spend time with their classmates through Student Hubs. Each Hub features student-run communities around their school – after school clubs, study groups, hangouts, classes, and more. Hubs are only accessible to users with an email address associated with that school. Servers within the hub are created by students who determine who has access to their server. Communities held within Student Hubs aren’t officially affiliated with schools themselves, nor are they intended for official school use.
We built Student Hubs with additional safety guidelines around cheating, bullying, or other toxic behaviors to ensure your students have a great, safe experience. For more information you can read through our Student Hubs FAQs for parents and educators.
We have a lot planned this school year to improve on our existing safety policies, settings, and experiences for teens. We will engage more directly with parents, educators, and child safety organizations, and we’re currently hiring for a Teen Safety Policy Manager to lead this charge. We’ll have other product updates and partnership announcements to come!
