Introduction

I was about to begin my drive back home and before I did I thought that I would go ahead and open Discord to check on any messages or pings that I missed while I was volunteering today. On my opening of the app, I was prompted with a pop-up screen that announced that Discord is changing its policies. At first I thought it was likely just their privacy policy since those seem to change on a dime these days due to constantly shifting trends, regulations, and laws regarding privacy [1]. However, I headed over to the discord blog and I was surprised to see that they were doing more than just their privacy policy. I set out to figure out why exactly they went along with these changes.

Summary of Changes

The changes of the policies according to the official blog are as follows [2]:
In the community guidelines section of their terms, they no longer allow the sharing of:

• Anti-vaccine content
• Medically unsupported and dangerous cures for disease
• Content that distorts information about a disease
• Content that could hinder the resolution of public health emergency
• Content that attempts to sway opinion through the use of sensationalized, alarmist, or hyperbolic language
• Content that repeats widely-debunked health claims, unsubstantiated rumors, or conspiratorial narratives

In other words, it’s clear that they’re changing policy to tow the tech line regarding COVID-19 related information. The main problem with these changes is that it’s now 2 years post-pandemic and in many places around the world, they are moving on no matter what government officials say. Too late.

But why did it come so late is the question? Many other platforms were cracking down on “misinformation” regarding COVID-19 from the very start of the pandemic. Yet, through two years of constant debate over how to handle COVID-19 did Discord reach their final solution. Is their corporate structure really that bad that it takes two years to make a large-scale corporate decision even though Facebook and Twitter are larger publicly traded companies? I think there’s something else at play.

A Hidden Reason for the Changes

Unfortunately for us, Discord is a typical west-cost San Francisco tech company in most ways. Which means that they’re likely to be under the influence of not only other Silicon Valley companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, but are also under the guise of the same informational sources. So, what do I mean by this? This means that if there are any informational reports, magazines, or news organizations popular amongst the bigger tech companies, it will likely influence discord as well. I already spoke about how Facebook and Twitter cracked down on misinformation already, but Discord may not have thought it was a problem for their app because it was never mentioned by name, that is until recently…

According to The Verge, it seems like a major influence on their decision was a report from a Think Tank called the Institute for Strategic Dialogue that’s based in the UK, but has an office in Washington, DC. In August 2021, they released a 12-page report titled The Extreme Right on Discord [3]. In the report, they analyzed 24 Discord servers and they found that extreme right-wing content could be easily identified. They also spend some significant time to showing that many of the right-wing discord server members were teenagers with an average age of 15. Lastly, they discuss the nature of raids in these servers and they “gamify” hate. They also have pictures of right-wing memes in the report too, it’s pretty funny at face value.

However, when looking at the methodology they posted, it’s becoming clear that this report has some malicious undertones in the way it was created. How the servers were found is in the image below:

What should stand out is that the authors had to go through pretty extensive steps to find these servers that they report on. They counted 39 total identifiable servers. Keeping in mind, that Discord at the time of this writing had over 350 million registered users and 150 million active users, this shows that number of right-wing “extremists” is incredibly low on the platform [4]. In a later part of the of the methodology, they report that of the largest server had 367 members while the smallest had 11 members and the average number per server was 108. Using that data, we can do the math and see that the average number of right-wing “extremists” totals a “whopping” 4,212 people. Using only the active userbase (150,000,000), this comes out to 0.0028% of all discord users.

So how is this significant? Assuming that this is also the target audience that discord wants to tackle for medical misinformation, since in the mind of most rank-and-file liberals, anti-vaxxers and right-wing extremists are one in the same [5]. Discord gave into nonsense research to attack “misinformation” and is prepared to needlessly spend money on it by acquiring a hate speech algorithm company Sentropy in 2021, and hiring another team of moderators, I’m assuming [6]. Hopefully, the rest of the Discord community sees that this isn’t an issue and will complain to the company about this. This type of action was successful in 2021, when Discord wanted to integrate NFTs and other crypto functions into their app. Once the users complained, the CEO Jason Citron backed off and put the idea to rest. I encourage any Discord users to voice their opinion to Discord and let them know that this idea is silly and that the threat of misinformation is pretty much non-existent on the platform.

References

[1] Stroink-Skillrud D. Why is every company updating their Privacy Policy? [Internet]. Termageddon. 2021 [cited 2022 Feb 25]. Available from: https://termageddon.com/why-every-company-updating-privacy-policy/.
[2] Addressing Health Misinformation [Internet]. [cited 2022 Feb 25]. Available from: https://discord.com/blog/addressing-health-misinformation.
[3] Gaming and Extremism: The Extreme Right on Discord [Internet]. ISD. [cited 2022 Feb 26]. Available from: https://www.isdglobal.org/isd-publications/gaming-and-extremism-the-extreme-right-on-discord/.
[4] Discord User and Funding Statistics: How Many People Use Discord in 2022? [Internet]. Backlinko. 2021 [cited 2022 Feb 26]. Available from: https://backlinko.com/discord-users.
[5] How the Anti-Vax Movement Is Taking Over the Right [Internet]. Time. [cited 2022 Feb 26]. Available from: https://time.com/6141699/anti-vaccine-mandate-movement-rally/.
[6] Discord - Funding, Financials, Valuation & Investors [Internet]. Crunchbase. [cited 2022 Feb 26]. Available from: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/discord/company_financials.