Discord launches new safety features following lawsuits
Discord launched new safety features aimed at helping parents stay informed about their teen's activity, the chat app announced Wednesday.
Discord's Family Center will now give parents or guardians the ability to view the top five users a teen messaged and called, the servers they more frequently messaged, their total call minutes in voice and video, and all the purchases they've made.
However, this history only extends to the past week. If a parent forgets to check their child's activity during a given week, the tracking starts over. To review past activity, a parent would have to find previous email summaries sent to their inbox.
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Additional new safety features include the ability for teens to alert their parents when they've reported objectionable or potentially rule-breaking content on Discord, as well as the option for guardians to enable certain settings, like sensitive-content filters and direct message controls. Parents will now be able to choose whether their teen can receive DMs from just friends or other server members.
Savannah Badalich, Discord's global head of product policy, told Mashable that the safety features reflect feedback from parents directly and through organizations the company partners with, including the National Parent Teacher Association and the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children's Hospital.
"They wanted more visibility and more control," Badalich said.
The new features will roll out over the next week. Badalich added that Discord will introduce more safety measures early next year. The company currently employs age assurance in the United Kingdom and is experimenting with it in Australia. Per Discord's policy, only users 13 and older are permitted to join, but teens frequently circumvent this rule by lying about their age.
Discord is especially popular amongst gamers who use it to simultaneously chat and play with friends and strangers. The app has been under increased scrutiny as a platform where bad actors and sexual predators have targeted and communicated with young users.
Haley McNamara, executive director and chief strategy officer of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, told Mashable in a statement that Discord's newest safety features fall short.
"Once again, a tech platform with a history of harming children rolls out parental controls that puts the burden exclusively on overwhelmed parents, without taking any ownership for designing a safe platform," McNamara said. The advocacy organization has previously placed Discord on its annual "Dirty Dozen" list, describing it as a "mainstream contributor to sexual exploitation."
A lawsuit filed this year against Discord and the gaming platform Roblox alleged that together the platforms created a "breeding ground for predators." At the heart of the complaint is an anonymous 11-year-old girl who was allegedly groomed, sexually exploited, and raped by a perpetrator who used Roblox and Discord to communicate with her.
Dolman Law Group, which brought the suit against both companies, has named Discord as a co-defendant in multiple complaints, including one filed on Oct. 30. In that case, the firm is representing the parent of a child who died by suicide after allegedly being harassed and manipulated by a predator who made contact via Roblox and Discord.
"For years, Defendants have misrepresented and deliberately concealed information about the pervasive predatory conduct that their apps enable and facilitate," the lawsuit alleges.
In a statement shared with Mashable, Dolman Law Group founder Matt Dolman welcomed the new resources but said they are also "far too little and way too late for the countless sexual abuse survivors who were groomed, exploited or abused by sexual predators facilitated by Discord's lax safety measures."
Roblox recently launched age verification for teens, along with other tools meant to make it harder for predators to target children.
While Badalich did not address the lawsuits against Discord, she told Mashable that Discord takes a "holistic view" of teen safety, noting that the company proactively identifies and flags content and accounts that could put users at risk. Discord's policy also forbids drawn or synthetic media depicting child sexual abuse.
Badalich did acknowledge that because Discord is a communication platform that serves teens, it navigates tension between giving young users the privacy they crave and offering their parents useful oversight tools to help ensure their safety.
"Ultimately, what we want is to catalyze conversations between teens and parents," Badalich said. Both parents and teens can find guides in the Family Center to help with discussions about online safety.
UPDATE: Nov. 5, 2025, 1:00 p.m. PST This story has been updated to include independent expertise on youth online safety and comments from Dolman Law Group founder Matt Dolman .
Topics Gaming Social Good Family & Parenting
Rebecca Ruiz is a Senior Reporter at Mashable. She frequently covers mental health, digital culture, and technology. Her areas of expertise include suicide prevention, screen use and mental health, parenting, youth well-being, and meditation and mindfulness. Rebecca's experience prior to Mashable includes working as a staff writer, reporter, and editor at NBC News Digital and as a staff writer at Forbes. Rebecca has a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and a masters degree from U.C. Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.
