HELPING YOUR TEEN STAY SAFE ON DISCORD

Explicit media content settings

From this menu, users can decide whether they want Discord to automatically scan and delete direct messages (DMs) that contain explicit media content. You can access this setting by going into User Settings, selecting the Privacy & Safety section, and finding the "Safe Direct Messaging" heading.

By default, this is set to “my friends are nice”, which means only DMs your teen receives from non-friends are scanned for explicit media. Choose ‘Keep me safe’ to have all DMs your teen receives scanned for explicit media.

Direct message (DM) settings

• This menu lets users determine who can contact them in a DM. You can access this setting by going into User Settings, selecting the Privacy & Safety section, and finding the "Server Privacy Defaults" heading.
• By default, whenever your teen is in a server, anyone in that server can send them a DM.
• You can disable the ability for anyone in a server with your teen to send your teen a DM by toggling “Allow direct messages from server members” to off. When you toggle this setting off, you will be prompted to choose if you would like to apply this change to all of your teen’s existing servers. If you click "No," this change will only affect new servers your teen joins, and you will need to adjust the DM settings individually for each server that they have previously joined (in Privacy Settings on the server’s dropdown list).

You can also control these settings on a server-by-server basis.

Friend request settings

• This menu lets you determine who can send your teen a friend request on Discord. You can access this setting by going into User Settings and selecting the Friend Requests section.
• Users should only accept friend requests from users that they know and trust. If your teen isn’t sure, there’s no harm in rejecting the friend request. They can always add that user later if it’s a mistake.

You can choose from the following options when deciding who can send your teen a friend request.

• Everyone - Selecting this means that anyone who knows your teen's Discord Tag or is in a mutual server with your teen can send your teen a friend request. This is handy if your teen doesn’t share servers with someone that introduced them to Discord and your teen wants to let them send a friend request with just your teen's Discord Tag.
• Friends of Friends - Selecting only this option means that for anyone to send your teen a friend request, they must have at least one mutual friend with your teen. You can view this in their user profile by clicking the Mutual Friends tab next to the Mutual Servers tab.
• Server Members - Selecting this means users who share a server with your teen can send your teen a friend request. Deselecting this while "Friends of Friends" is selected means that your teen can only be sent a friend request by someone with a mutual friend.

If you don’t want your teen to receive ANY friend requests, you can deselect all three options. However, your teen can still send out friend requests to other people.

Blocking

If someone is bothering your teen, you always have the option to block the user. Blocking on Discord removes the user from your teen's Friends List, prevents them from messaging your teen directly, and hides their messages in any shared servers.

To block someone, they can simply right-click on their @username and select Block.

If your teen has blocked a user but that user creates a new account to try and contact them, please report the user to the Trust & Safety team. You can learn more about how to do this at this link.

Deleting an account

If you or your teen would like to delete your teen’s Discord account, please follow the steps described in this article. Please note that we are unable to delete an account by request from someone other than the account owner.