It was revealed that white supremacists used Discord to plan the deadly Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville. While initially created for video gaming communities to communicate in invite-only chat rooms, Discord has been overrun by the alt-right. Storyful journalists saw that a forum user going by the user name “Breadbox” posted in a Discord channel called “QCA Backup” – for Qanon Clearance Archive, which archived all the Qanon posts – directing conspiracists to move to Voat, an alternative version of Reddit with what is theoretically a more lax view regarding the subject of online speech. In the days following Reddit’s September 2018 ban of a bustling group devoted to the QAnon conspiracy theory, regular participants regrouped on Discord and fringe platforms like Voat and 8chan. Its privacy features have made it an easy place to organize everything from a gaming session with friends to doxing and harassment campaigns. A server can have two people or thousands of people, with each chat room not discoverable without an invite.ĭiscussion topics on Discord vary from colleges to birds, but Discord’s private chat nature, which enables hate and violence to go undetected, has made it a hub for communities of neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Within each server, which can be private or public, a group can set up discussion channels. How Does Discord Work?ĭiscord is a free voice, text and video chatting platform with invite-only chat rooms referred to as ‘servers.” Think of it as a Slack-Skype hybrid.
The app was created in 2015, but gained its following as Fortnight and other multiplayer online games gained popularity. For comparison, Snapchat has 190 million users while Twitter has 321 million.
The Discord app, often written off as “that app gamers use” now has more than 250 million registered users, up from 130 million a year ago. Platforms like Snapchat, Twitter, and YouTube are household names around the world, but how many marketers, communications professionals, and journalists are familiar with Discord? The social media landscape is vast and the rise of misinformation and disinformation mandates that brands and newsrooms track and analyze the flow of information on less mainstream platforms and forums, such as 4chan, Gab, Voat and Discord.
0 kommentar(er)
