Discord

Attorney General filed lawsuit alleging Discord's flawed age verification allows children under 13 to bypass requirements, and that even with safety filters enabled, children were exposed to CSAM and predators.

In 2024-2025, the Department of Homeland Security warned that young people were being radicalized in Discord servers. A DHS memo noted the average age of members in extremist Discord channels was 15. An Iowa school shooter in 2024 had warned on Discord he was 'gearing up' before killing two people. Since August 2023, three US plots involving juveniles sharing Islamic State messaging in private Discord chats were disrupted. The ADL found Discord's content moderation for private groups was primarily reactive, depending on user reports rather than proactive filtering.

A data harvesting website called Spy.pet scraped messages from 620 million Discord users across more than 14,000 servers, accumulating over 4 billion public messages between November 2023 and April 2024. The site sold access to the database to anyone including law enforcement, AI training companies, and individuals spying on contacts. Discord ultimately took action to shut down Spy.pet, but the incident highlighted vulnerabilities in Discord's platform security that allowed months of large-scale data scraping before detection.

In January 2024, Discord laid off 170 employees (17% of its workforce) as the company sought to reach profitability. CEO Jason Citron acknowledged the company had grown its workforce 5x since 2020 and taken on too many projects. This followed a smaller round of approximately 40 layoffs (4% of workforce) in August 2023. Those laid off received five months of salary plus an additional week per year of service, along with five months of benefits continuation. The company had raised approximately $1 billion in venture capital but remained unprofitable.

Discord launched Teen Safety Assist in 2023, introducing safety alerts for first-time DMs, content filters to blur sensitive media, and a warning system designed to educate rather than punish teen users. The features were developed in collaboration with child safety organization Thorn. In 2025, Discord announced its founding role in ROOST (Robust Open Online Safety Tools), a cross-industry nonprofit offering free open-source tools to detect, review, and report CSAM. Discord's Chief Legal Officer serves as ROOST board chair, and the company contributed funding, technology, and employee expertise.

The American Foundation for the Blind recognized Discord's desktop app as a model example of how to make a complex web application accessible to screen reader users. Discord committed to WCAG 2.1 compliance and introduced accessibility features including Role Colors for colorblind users, a saturation slider for color sensitivities, text-to-speech controls, and motion/contrast adjustments. During Disability Pride Month, the company open-sourced its React-Native Drag and Drop backend to help other developers build accessible experiences.

An NBC News investigation in June 2023 found that at least 35 child abduction, grooming, or exploitation prosecutions and 165 CSAM prosecutions involved Discord communications. Hundreds of active servers promoting child exploitation were identified. The FBI subsequently warned in September 2023 that violent online groups were deliberately targeting minors aged 8-17 on messaging platforms including Discord to extort them into producing CSAM, with LGBTQ+ youth and racial minorities particularly targeted.

In November 2022, the French data protection authority CNIL fined Discord Inc. 800,000 euros for multiple GDPR violations. An investigation found over 2.4 million French accounts inactive for at least three years and 58,000 inactive for over five years, with no written data retention policy. Discord also accepted weak six-character passwords, failed to conduct a data protection impact assessment despite processing data of minors, and did not adequately inform users about data retention periods. Discord subsequently implemented remedial measures including a two-year retention policy and stronger password requirements.