Brazil's federal government will announce a set of measures against Discord this Wednesday, August 26, after negotiations for a formal conduct agreement with the messaging and voice chat platform collapsed, according to Folha de S.Paulo. The announcement will come jointly from the Ministry of Justice and Public Security, the Attorney General's Office (AGU) and the Presidency's communications secretariat.
The agreement under discussion, known in Brazil as a TAC (Termo de Ajustamento de Conduta), works like an out-of-court settlement: a company commits in writing to fix a problem within a set timeline, in exchange for closing investigations and avoiding formal penalties. According to people familiar with the talks cited by Folha, the proposals Discord put forward were judged insufficient, with officials concluding the company had not committed to structural changes in how the platform operates.
How the pressure campaign started
The push against Discord in Brazil gained force after the death of a 13-year-old girl in Naviraí, in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, on July 22. According to state police and the Ministry of Justice, she was allegedly induced by other users to self-harm and take her own life during a livestream on the platform, an episode that led police to detain five teenagers and arrest an 18-year-old man. According to CartaCapital, Discord itself acknowledged to the Ministry of Justice a failure in its safety systems: the broadcast began at 2:20 a.m., but the first internal alert about imminent risk of death was issued only at 3:50 a.m., and the server was not taken down until 4:15 a.m., nearly two hours after it started.
It was against this backdrop that First Lady Janja da Silva publicly called, on August 6, for Discord to be blocked in Brazil by any means. The next day, Brazil's data protection authority, the ANPD, opened a separate enforcement process against the company, while the AGU began demanding concrete age-verification and risk-prevention measures.
Two separate tracks, one company under pressure
It is worth separating the two fronts. The TAC negotiation that just collapsed involved only the Ministry of Justice and the AGU. The ANPD, which runs its own process and was not part of those talks, ordered on August 12 the suspension of livestreaming and other video features on Discord in Brazil, a measure the company complied with starting August 17. According to Poder360, Discord appealed that suspension on August 24, arguing the ANPD lacks legal authority to order this kind of block under Brazil's ECA Digital (the country's child-protection framework for digital platforms), which the company says limits the agency to penalties such as warnings and fines. As an alternative, Discord proposed converting the suspension into a formal compliance plan with a technical timeline, or reactivating services gradually under fixed deadlines.
Discord's business model helps explain why the company is resisting deeper changes. Unlike Instagram or TikTok, Discord has no central team scanning every message: each server, essentially a themed group chat, is run by volunteer moderators chosen by its own community, and the company makes money from Nitro subscriptions and transaction fees inside servers rather than from data-driven advertising the way Instagram does. Adding stronger age checks or active monitoring inside every private server cuts against the very thing that makes the platform appealing to users: the sense of a closed, lightly-watched space.
What we still don't know
As of this report, neither the Ministry of Justice nor the AGU had publicly detailed what measures will be announced Wednesday, whether administrative, judicial, or both. It also remains unclear whether the package will include any restriction on access to the platform in Brazil, something the AGU had already told CartaCapital was not off the table if the company fails to meet legal requirements. Braziltopia researched this story through reporting from Folha de S.Paulo, Poder360 and CartaCapital; none of them had access to the full text of the proposal Discord submitted to the AGU or to the measures set to be announced.
For anyone using Discord in Brazil, or with children and teenagers who do, the practical thing to watch is Wednesday's announcement: it will show whether the platform changes how it verifies age and moderates servers, or whether the standoff escalates into something more drastic, like a court-ordered access restriction. In the meantime, it is worth reviewing privacy settings on minors' accounts and treating any server that promises total anonymity with caution, exactly the kind of environment cited in the investigations into the Naviraí case.