Discord's head of trust and safety said Tuesday that the popular chat platform was changing and clarifying its child safety policies including those around around teen dating and AI-generated child sexual abuse material, an announcement that comes after an NBC News investigation last month into child safety on the platform.
John Redgrave, Discord's vice president of trust and safety, said that Discord was expanding its policies to address generative artificial intelligence that can create fake content and the sexualization of children, specifically banning AI depictions of child sexual abuse and even the sexualization of children in text chats. The Washington Post reported in June that AI-generated child sex images have proliferated across the internet in recent months.
Discord has been a hub for communities devoted to the creation of generative AI images and has hosted several integrations that allow users to generate them. Sexually themed images are frequently created on those servers.
The company said in a blog post announcing the changes that the updated child sexual abuse material policy would include “any text or media content that sexualizes children, including drawn, photorealistic, and AI-generated photorealistic child sexual abuse material. The goal of this update is to ensure that the sexualization of children in any context is not normalized by bad actors.”
Redgrave also said that the company was instituting policy changes and clarifications to explicitly ban teen dating, which experts previously told NBC News posed a significant opportunity for adults looking to exploit or groom children.
As part of its policy updates, Discord announced the launch of more tools for parental control. In a new Family Center tool, parents and kids can opt in to have parents receive updates about their kids' activities on the platform.
Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.
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