Game-focused chat platform Discord took to Twitter today to announce it was shutting down a number of accounts and a chat server associated with an alt-right website in an ongoing effort to combat “white supremacy, Nazi ideology, and all forms of hate.”
This is a notable, public example of a game-centric company actively curating and managing its community. Such efforts are all the more important — and impactful — as the communities served by communication platforms like Discord, Twitch, and YouTube continue to grow.
While the chat server in question has been operating for some time, Discord’s statement suggests that it is targeting specific acounts tied to a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia over the weekend that became violent, resulting in multiple deaths and injuries.
“We unequivocally condemn white supremacy, neonazism, or any other group, term, ideology that is based on these beliefs,” Discord CMO Eros Resmini told Polygon today.
“They are not welcome on Discord. While we don’t read people’s private servers our Terms of Service explicitly forbid harassment, threatening messages, or calls to violence. When hatred like this violates our community standards we act swiftly to take servers down and ban individual users.”
Discord has in the past been called out for serving as a tool used in organizing coordinated harassment and abuse.
Discord CEO Jason Citron chatted with Polygon about this a few months ago and acknowledged that the platform does play host to toxic behavior, but said it was difficult to shut down servers and accounts that violate Discord’s Terms of Use or Community Guidelines because servers are self-moderated and there are quite a lot of them.