A Guardian's Guide to Discord

As the school year ahead ramps up for your teen, we know there is a lot to mentally prepare for as a parent or guardian. Being able to support your teen in forging new or growing current relationships, is challenging to navigate across the various digital platforms. This is where we at Discord want to help. 

Guardians have a lot of great resources to help their teens navigate the online world, but we wanted to provide a resource about Discord, from Discord. That’s why we introduced our new Guardian’s Guide to Discord built to help you better understand how Discord works, to provide information on how your teen might spend time on Discord, and to discover tips and resources to talk to your teen about keeping their online experiences comfortable.

Here’s a snapshot preview of what to expect:

Let’s first start with what is Discord?  

Discord is a voice, video and text platform that makes it easier and more fun for friends to talk and hang out before, during, and after playing games.   

We're in the business of authentic connection, not doom scrolling. Our platform brings people together over shared experiences and gives everyone a place to belong. With over 200 million monthly active users, Discord helps friends and communities of all sizes come together to hang out and explore their interests. In our guide, we provide a glossary to further breakdown the Discord lingo. 

Who can talk to your teen on Discord?

No matter how your teen chooses to use Discord, our customizable settings allow them to curate the best experience for their needs.

• User Settings - Global defaults: Imagine Discord as a city with many neighborhoods. User settings are the rules across all of Discord. They help you understand what to expect regardless of what neighborhoods you visit in Discord city.
• Server Settings - “Defaults” for specific places: Server settings can be thought of as rules for a specific neighborhood or part of your city. In addition to the  rules that are in place for a city, you can choose the neighborhood and can apply additional controls for each.
• Individuals - Actions on specific people: Sometimes there are specific people you don’t want to engage at all or people you no longer want to be your friends. Discord allows users to decide who they interact with. 

Discord's approach to building comfortable experiences

You can read more in the Guardian’s Guide, but Discord has several tools that help us maintain an environment where teens are comfortable to find and to build authentic friendships.  

• Our Family Center is an opt-in tool to help you learn more about how your teen spends their time on Discord and about the groups they are a part of. This is a go-to tool for guardians to view information about your teen’s recent activity and you’ll also receive weekly updates containing a high level summary of their activity via email.
You can find Family Center by going to the “Family Center” section of user settings (⚙️).
• Our Teen Safety Assist initiative is focused on further protecting teens through features, including multiple safety alerts and sensitive content filters, that are default enabled for teen users.
• Hear from the global teens we met with to co-create our newly published Teen Charter. This set of principles represent the expectations teens have of each other and of Discord. These principles include: 
  • Authenticity - come as you are‍
  • Inclusivity - take space, make space‍
  • Privacy - what's yours is yours‍
  • Transparency - know the Discord deets

All of these efforts sit on top of the content moderation work our team does and our work to develop products that adhere to our “Safety by Design” principle, ensuring we consider safety in every design decision. To learn more about how we approach safety and privacy here at Discord, we have more resources in our regularly-updated Safety Center.

Learn about Discord’s approach to protecting teen’s mental health from our Mental Health Policy Manager, Patricia Noel, LMSW during FOSI’s Screens and Wellbeing: Tech’s Role in Back-to-School Mental Health webinar tomorrow, September 4th 12:00 PM ET - REGISTER HERE.