Thanks to the endless depressing degree to which covid keeps everyone trapped inside, Discord is more relevant than ever before. But as the company in his latest transparency report, which has led to new challenges – and improved efforts to meet other challenges, it would probably have to take more effort sooner.
Disagreement, reportedly in talks with Microsoft to sell about 1.3 Bethesda ties, released the Transparency Report today. Amid standard operational insights about Discord’s second half of 2020, a few details stood out. First, the total number of user reports increased fairly gradually in 2020 – from 26,886 in January to 65,103 in December – with the number initially popping up in March. It makes sense; people were trapped in their homes, and Discord grew rapidly as a result. Spam led to the most account claims (over 3 million), with exploitative content, including non-consensual pornography, in a distant second (129,403) and harassment in third place (33,615).
Discord also pointed out that some of the reports that were made regularly acted regularly on issues related to child crime, cybercrime, doxing, exploitative content and extremist or violent content. “This can be partly explained by the team’s prioritization of issues in 2020 that are likely to cause harm in the real world,” the company said in the transparency report.
According to the report, in the second half of 2020, Discord removed more than 1,500 servers for violent extremism, which they said was a 93% increase from the first half of the year. ‘It cited groups like the Boogaloo Boys and QAnon as examples.
“This increase can be attributed to the expansion of our anti-extremism efforts as well as growing trends in the online extremism space,” the company wrote. “One of the online trends observed during this period was the growth of QAnon. We adjusted our efforts to address the movement and eventually removed 334 QAnon-related servers. ”
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Removals of cybercrime servers skyrocketed in the same way over the course of 2020, rising 140% from the first half of the year. In total, Discord removed nearly 6,000 cybercrime servers in the second half of 2020, which resulted in a significant increase in reports. “More cybercrime spaces than ever were marked under Trust & Safety, and more were eventually removed from our site,” Discord wrote.
Discord also emphasizes its focus on methods that make it possible to ‘proactively detect and remove groups with the greatest damage from our platform’, citing its efforts against extremism as an example, but also mentioning where it has made a mistake .
‘We were disappointed to realize that one of our tools for proactive detection in this period [sexualized content related to minors] servers contained an error, ‘Discord wrote. “As a result, our team was less. The bug has since been fixed – and we have started removing the tool surfaces servers again. ”
The other issue here is that Discord made a real effort to remove QAnon content about the same time other platforms did—After most of the damage has already been done. Although removal could be proactive by Discord’s internal definition, platforms were slow to act even reactively when it came to QAnon as a whole – leading to actual and lasting damage in the United States and around the world. Back in 2017, Discord also functions as an important stage for Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia that finally led to violence and three deaths. While the platform has since tried to clean it up, it has played host to an abundance of abuse and alt-right activity as recently as 2017.
Some transparency is much better than none, but it is noteworthy that the transparency reports of technology companies are often prgives little insight into how decisions are made and the greater priorities of the platforms that essentially control our online lives. Earlier this year, for example, Discord banned the server of r / WallStreetBets at the height of GameStop stonksapalooza. Bystanders suspect foul play – outside interference of some kind. Talk to Kotakuhowever two sources made it clear that labyrinthine policies for internal moderation eventually led Discord to make that decision. Poor timing and insufficient transparency before and after taking care of the rest.
This is just a small example of how these dynamics can play out. There is much more. Platforms may say they are transparent, but in the end they only give a bunch of barely contextualized numbers. It’s hard to say what real transparency looks like in the era of all-encompassing technology platforms, but it’s not.
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