Discord is a group-chat app that is often used by people who enjoy playing video games with their friends who live far away. I use Discord to play Dungeons & Dragons with my friends, and have used it to talk to people while playing Diablo III. Unfortunately, it appears that a lot of terrible people had been using Discord for nefarious reasons. Discord has rightfully banned them.
Discord provided a lot of information in their Transparency Report which covers July through December of 2020. There is a pie chart that shows user reports by category. Harassment was the largest category, with 132,817 reports. This was followed by Cybercrime (42,588) and NSFW (33,106).
NPR reported that Discord removed more than 2,000 communities dedicated to extremism and other violent content in the second half of last year. NPR noted that the enforcement actions by Discord come at a time when Microsoft is (reportedly) in talks to acquire Discord for $10 billion.
Discord’s transparency report points out that it has invested in resources that enable it to proactively detect and remove the highest-harm groups from their platform. This includes many categories including: Exploitative Content, and Violent Extremist groups.
We also worked in the second half of 2020 to take action against militarized movements like the “Boogaloo Boys” and dangerous conspiratorial groups like QAnon. We continue to believe there is no place on Discord for groups organizing around hate, violence, or extremist ideologies.
Discord’s Trust & Safety team removed 1,504 servers for Violent Extremism in the second half of 2020. That is nearly a 93% increase from the first half of the year. According to Discord, the increase can be attributed to the expansion of their anti-extremism efforts as well as growing trends in the online extremism space.
One of the online trends Discord observed in that period of time was the growth of QAnon. Discord adjusted their efforts to address that movement and removed 334 QAnon-related servers.
Personally, I’m happy that Discord has been making efforts to remove violent extremism and conspiracy theories. Some of the Discords that I am connected to, and participate in, are open to anyone who wants to join. Knowing that Discord has been actively removing bad actors from its service makes me feel safer using it.