Following reports of child exploitation and grooming across the service, Discord, the widely-used gaming chat platform, has announced sweeping changes to its policies. The new rules include a ban on teen dating and AI-generated child sexual abuse material.
Breitbart News previously reported that in the wake of growing concerns over child exploitation on the popular gaming chat platform Discord, CEO Jason Citron voiced his alarm and commitment to tackling the issue. Discord has long been recognized as a troubling vector for groomers and sexual deviants to reach children and teens.
teenage gamers (Dark Dwarf/FLickr)
Now, NBC News reports that John Redgrave, Discord’s vice president of trust and safety, has stated that the company is expanding its policies to tackle the potential misuse of generative artificial intelligence that can create inappropriate content, specifically the sexualization of children. Redgrave stated that the company is specifically banning AI depictions of child sexual abuse and the sexualization of children in text chats.
The decision comes amid growing concerns over the misuse of AI technology to create explicit content involving minors. Reports have indicated that AI-generated child sex images have been proliferating across the internet in recent months. Discord, known for hosting communities devoted to creating generative AI images, has been a focal point of these concerns.
Redgrave also announced that the company is instituting policy changes to explicitly ban teen dating on its platform. In a blog post, Discord stated: “in this context, we also believe that dating online can result in self-endangerment. Under this policy, teen dating servers are prohibited on the platform and we will take action against users who are engaging in this behavior.”
The company’s updated child sexual abuse material policy will 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.
In addition to these changes, Discord is also taking steps to prevent instances of older teens grooming younger teens. “Older teens engaging in the grooming of a younger teen will be reviewed and actioned under our Inappropriate Sexual Conduct with Children and Grooming Policy,” the company stated.
As part of its commitment to child safety, Discord is launching more tools for parental control. A new feature, the Family Center tool, will allow parents and kids to opt in to have parents receive updates about their kids’ activities on the platform.
Read more at NBC News here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan