What is Discord?

The Discord platform is a widely used text, video, and audio chat app that can be found on computers, browsers, and mobile phones. Originally designed for video game users to chat with each other while playing online games, the app has gained popularity even outside of the gamer community, with over 30% of users  they use Discord for activities other than gaming. Discord itself has capitalized on this expansion of their brand, advertising Discord as a way for teachers to reach their classrooms, virtual book clubs to discuss their latest read, and even positioning Discord as a viable workplace alternative to Slack or Microsoft Teams.

The main feature of Discord is the servers–chat rooms where like-minded individuals can join and play and talk about virtually anything together, all in real-time. Servers can be open to the public or private, requiring invites and special passwords to join. Moderation within these servers has historically been mostly left up to the members themselves, relying on user reports to catch bad behavior. Discord’s marketing chief confirmed this, saying: “We will not go into a private server unless something is reported to us. We believe deeply that privacy is a right and something we should support as a company.” The age verification procedures are similarly lax. Users were not even asked their birthday upon signup until mid 2020—which now remains the only real age verification Discord provides for its users.

The laissez-faire moderation attitude from Discord has created an environment that fosters sexual exploitation and abuse on a mass scale.

With the expansion of Discord’s brand to include more than just gamers, the platform has opened its doors to predators and abusers and is allowing them to settle comfortably within Discord’s servers. While individual channels within a server can be age-gated with a “NSFW” tag, this is easily circumvented by Discord’s lack of true age verification or moderation. And finding these channels is not a difficult task—over.

The real problem is not just the sheer amount of graphic content embedded throughout Discord, but the nature of that content. Pornography trading has become popular on the platform, where users can share links and images of themselves and others. Entire servers are dedicated to finding and sharing non-consensual sexual images of girls and women—sometimes known as revenge porn. Discord made international news in 2020 when one server revealed over 140,000 images of women and even minors had been widely shared and distributed.

Discord’s Safety Settings Fail to Protect Children

Discord has also struggled to protect children who use their platform from being targeted and contacted directly by adult predators. These bad actors are notorious for using and abusing online gaming systems and social media sites like Discord to befriend and then prey on vulnerable young people. One extreme case ended with two teenage boys being trafficked and held hostage for over a year after being groomed on Discord. A review of Discord from a concerned parent said this about the platform:

“Seriously poor protection for children. Firstly, let’s dispel the myth that your child on here is safe as they can block people and only be found by people they choose to link with. They meet these ‘people’ on games who befriend them there and from there send them to discord groups and invites therefore bypassing the invite system. My child has gotten involved with a group who are far beyond the realms of any decency and the conversations people were having with my 14 year old have made me sick. I am just glad I have found out in time to try and prevent any further psychological problems. He has been slowly groomed and I guess it could have been only a matter of time before something dangerous happened. I would seriously not recommend this to any child or parent until it gets some sort of filters and security in place to stop people creating and running these sort of perverted and deviant groups.”

Sexual Grooming on Discord

Discord prides itself as a company and platform that treats others and the community with respect, and keeps itself as “a safe and friendly place for everyone.” However, in addition to Discord’s troubling association with hosting and normalizing exploitative explicit images, Discord has facilitated a space for sexual grooming by abusers or sex traffickers, leaving it anything but a safe and friendly place for minors. These abusers or traffickers know minors are on Discord, and utilize the platform to engage with minor users through mutual servers and direct messaging.

Grooming is more than adults simply talking online with children. Research shows just how dangerous this open contact from predators to vulnerable minors really is—one study found that predators who actually made contact with child victims are more likely to use the Internet to locate potential sexual abuse victims and engage in grooming behavior. Groomers use a variety of tactics to gain the victim’s trust, including using pornography as a tool to manipulate the child into believing the sexual abuse is normal. One study noted:

“Indeed, part of the grooming process is the normalisation of sexual activity with children and breaking down inhibitions. Offenders use child pornography to teach children how to masturbate, perform oral sex and engage in sexual intercourse. Sometimes, blackmail is also involved, usually at the later stage, after the child has been exposed to some sort of pornography, or after the child has performed sexual favours. The saturation of the Internet with such material may serve to ‘normalise’ this behaviour and probably makes it easier to objectify children as sexual artifacts.”