The Government of Brazil ordered this Wednesday the suspension of live rooms and video sharing on the Discord platform following the suicide of a 13-year-old girl who self-mutilated at the request of other users during a live broadcast.
The minor took her own life on July 22 in Naviraí, a municipality in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, after a 45-minute session in which other participants induced her to harm herself and also encouraged her to torture and kill a cat.
The precautionary decision was imposed by the National Data Protection Agency (ANPD), which gave the company a three-day deadline to implement the measure. The restrictions will remain in effect until Discord demonstrates that it has adopted effective mechanisms to protect minors.
The agency argues that the platform’s live streams have been used repeatedly to perpetrate serious crimes that put the physical and mental integrity of minors under 18 at risk.
The investigation was opened after Brazil’s first lady, Rosângela “Janja” Lula da Silva, publicly called for the platform to be blocked during an official event alongside President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in which he signed a law that increases penalties for those who sexually assault minors.
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At that event, Janja stated: “We need to block Discord at all costs. I cannot accept that a 13-year-old girl mutilates herself live on the Internet, on Discord, hangs herself, and dies. I cannot accept a country like this”.
Brazil ordered the suspension of live rooms and video sharing on Discord following the suicide of a 13-year-old girl
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The Federal Police arrested six people linked to the live stream: five teenagers between 13 and 17 years old and one 18-year-old adult. All are being investigated for aggravated homicide and membership in a criminal organization.
The group, led by a 14-year-old arrested in Rio de Janeiro, operated from different parts of the country —Mato Grosso do Sul, Minas Gerais, Ceará, and Pará—, which evidences the network’s geographical reach.
Researchers point out that there was a second minor in the session, but that she left it. The accused even sent money to the victim so that, without her mother’s knowledge, she could buy the blades with which she injured herself. In the raids, officers seized computers, cell phones, bladed weapons, and neo-Nazi paraphernalia.
In parallel to the judicial process, the ANPD initiated an inspection of Discord the previous Friday and held a meeting with the company’s legal representatives on Tuesday. According to the agency, the platform did not present “solid evidence” of having adopted reasonable measures to prevent minors from accessing content that violates their rights. The agency also pointed out that, at the beginning of March, Discord made technical changes to the ‘Go Live’ feature—as live streaming rooms are known—that made it “even less safe for children and adolescents,” in violation of current legislation.
In a document sent to the Brazilian Ministry of Justice and dated August 10, Discord acknowledged that there were signs of risk in the transmission, but that these were not sufficient to trigger an alert in its systems.
“During the relevant period, the server contained names, role tags, and text communications that, upon post-incident review, were identified as indicators associated with a broader high-harm ecosystem. At the time of the incident, those signals did not trigger in isolation or in combination,” the company admitted.
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According to the same document, the transmission received a risk score of 0.12 in the platform’s internal system, well below the 0.95 threshold required for automated identification. Discord reported that this result is being re-examined to evaluate potential improvements in the system’s sensitivity.
A technical note from the National Data Protection Agency concluded that Discord lacks tools that enable content analysis and violation detection mechanisms in real time, and that the platform “relies on flawed automated systems and reports by the participants themselves”.
The document added that “when the imminent risk of serious injury, self-harm, or death of a child or adolescent is at stake, the cost of a false negative is incomparably higher than the cost of subjecting a given server to additional human analysis.”
Discord, for its part, described the ANPD’s decision as “premature” and pointed out that the criminal activity that led to the teenager’s death had been coordinated on other platforms before the creation of the Discord server, and that it continued in those environments after the users were blocked. The company stated that it had identified and deactivated the private server —accessible only by invitation— before the young woman’s death, after receiving a communication from a security agency at 3:50 a.m., and having deleted the server less than 25 minutes later.
Discord, which was born as a platform for video game players, has about 200 million monthly active users worldwide. Brazil is one of the most relevant markets for big tech companies: its more than 200 million inhabitants are among the largest internet consumers on the planet.
The current government is carrying out a regulation process for platforms and social networks that has already generated friction with both companies and the Donald Trump administration. In 2024, Brazil blocked the X network for 40 days by court order.
