Discord is popular with young people, especially in the online gaming community, but parents should be mindful of potential security risks. Children and teens on Discord could be vulnerable to bullying and cyberattacks. In this article, we explain how safe Discord is and how to stay protected while using it.
What is Discord?
Discord is an internet platform on which users post text and images, send direct messages, and take part in video and voice calls.“Users can access the platform through a browser or via an app.”
Discord users can set up private servers to host conversations and group video calls. Like other social media platforms, Discord is used mostly for socializing. Discord servers are especially popular with online gamers who use voice channels on Discord to communicate while playing.
Some aspects of Discord are similar to other social platforms like Facebook or Instagram. People can accept friend requests to connect with peers, share images and links, and hang out online.
What are the age requirements for joining Discord?
Discord requires users to state that they are over 13 years of age to create an account. However, although it does have some age verification systems in place, unsupervised children may still be able to bypass them and access the site.
How does Discord work?
To understand how Discord works, you first need to understand it’s servers. A server acts as a private online forum, segmented into many channels. Server members can post text, images, and video links in a channel or engage in voice and video chats with multiple users.
Whoever sets up the server has admin rights, allowing them to add and remove members, ban certain words or content, and set up new server channels. An admin can also give other users admin rights.
Without ever joining a specific server, individual users can also send each other friend requests and communicate directly through private messages.
Fundamentally, Discord is a relatively simple platform designed to allow communities to form and exist online. But how safe is it?
Is Discord safe?
You can use Discord safely, as long as you’re careful and avoid common Discord risk factors.
Like any social media platform, it does require some personal information from its users, and that data could be leaked if it suffers a data breach. This isn’t unique to it — when you entrust a big company with information like your email, passwords, and location data, there is always a possibility that your data could find its way into the wrong hands.
How safe it is depends on two things: the types of servers you join, and the precautionary steps you take to protect yourself along the way. First among those steps is proper management of Discord’s privacy and security settings.
Use Discord’s privacy and security settings
To make sure you’re using Discord’s privacy and security settings to stay as safe as possible, follow these steps:
- Change who can send you direct messages. You can limit the direct message function to ensure that only trusted friends can contact you.
- Change who can add you as a friend. In your settings, choose whether “everyone” can send you requests or just “friends of friends.” If you want to be even safer, you can limit friend requests to members of a specific private server.
- Automatically delete messages that contain explicit content. If this function is enabled, unwanted explicit messages will be screened and deleted before they can be seen by you.
- Decide whether the app can collect your data. Discord allows you to decide how much of your information it stores. While some data collection is inevitable, being able to change these settings gives you a little more control over the process.
- Block and report users. If you don’t want to be contacted by specific users, they can be blocked by you, and even reported for misbehavior if it is thought that their actions are breaking the terms of Discord’s user agreement (for example, engaging in identity theft or bullying).
What risks and concerns does Discord pose?
Discord ushers face a variety of threats, from bullying and exposure to explicit content to malware and Discord scams.
Because users are allowed by the site to post and message links to other web pages, links to servers where malicious software is housed can be easily spread by hackers. Discord malware threats are particularly prevalent on larger servers, where admins may struggle to moderate content. If a server is public — that is, if anyone can join it without admin approval — the risks of malware links are much higher.
Some servers may also contain explicit images and videos, and while users who post this kind of material sometimes tag their servers with an NSFW (not safe for work) content warning, some do not. The risk of exposure to inappropriate content is hard to mitigate for a young person with their own account.
Discord also has the same problems that any social media network has: human interactions. Cyberbullying and harassment take place on these as much as they do on any other site where strangers can communicate without having to use their real names.
