Discord

Username offensive username could be used

Password Other than the password having to be 8 characters long there are no complexity requirements so you can enter a very weak password such as Pa55w0rd! and Discord will accept that as a password. This means that Instagram accounts can be very susceptible to hacking especially if two factor authentication is not enabled on the account.

Multi Factor Authentication Discord supports two factor authentication however, as with most apps, it is not enabled by default when it absolutely should be. It can be enabled in the app and it should be turned on as soon as you setup your account.

The two most common ways to communicate on Discord are text and voice chat. Discord supports video chat too, but there is a resolution limit and it doesn’t always perform well, not to mention only 25 users can join a video call. You can also create a group chat or send direct messages to other Discord users who aren’t on the same servers you use.

Voice chat is arguably the best-known use of Discord. Servers have one or more voice channels where members can join and talk to each other. You can even have different voice channels for different purposes — team channels for your gaming server, a regular voice channel for your friends group, a voice channel for the mods and more.

Teens can access Discord via their PC, browser, or mobile phone. Once there, they can join a chat they’ve been invited to, or they can create private servers and invite their friends to play and discuss games by voice, text, or video. They can also message each other individually or in group chats.

Discord access includes microphone and camera

Discord does not require location services although there is a ‘Nearby’ feature that allows you to add friends who have the location features on their device turned on that are physically nearby.

Discord only allows streaming from your Windows and Mac apps. There’s no way to live stream directly from a mobile phone or the browser.

Discord has set a streaming watch limit of 10 people. This means that 10 people can watch your live-stream at any given time. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Discord has increased the limit to 50 people and has stated it will stay that way until it is no longer “critically needed.”

Although 13 is the minimum age to access the app and website, Discord “updated its age rating to 17+ at Apple’s request.

The Google Play Store has a “Teen” rating.

Because users may share images on text channels or engage in voice chat, young users run the risk of exposure to inappropriate content or language.

Although the age limit of Discord is 13 years old in its terms of services and users need to provide their birth date to create a Discord account, there is no age verification. That is to say, users under 13, like 12, 11, 10, and even 9 years old, can still get access to Discord by providing a fake date of birth.

The French data protection authority CNIL carried out an online inspection of the Discord mobile application and discord.com platform on 17 November 2020. On 17 November 2022, CNIL announced, that it had issued, on 10 November 2022, a decision, that Discord Inc, a company based in the United States, had failed to comply with several obligations under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

There is the potential for a lot of stranger interaction on Discord. Predators know one of the best ways to build a relationship with a child and groom them to be sexually exploited is through online gaming. Discord is and continues to be fertile ground for predators.

In 2020, 10 men were arrested and sentenced for utilizing private servers to produce and exchange child pornography on Discord. They actively worked together to identify minor females’ social media platforms and profiles, including girls as young as 10-years-old and strategized how to convince the children to engage in sexually explicit activity via live web camera. While pretending to be minor boys and girls, the predators streamed pre-recorded videos of other underage minors engaging in similar conduct to the targeted victims to get the children to believe they were watching a live video of someone their age. The victims were unaware that they were communicating with adult men and recording their sexually explicit activity. After successfully recording a victim, the defendants shared the sexually explicit videos by uploading the files to file-storage sites and placing a link to download the file on a section of their private Discord server. There were more than 172 victims.¹

Pornography can be easily found on Discord’s private servers.

There are privacy settings that will help limit who your child can chat with and possibly filter out explicit content from DMs.