Some of these servers, especially the Discord chat spun out of 4chan’s far-right stomping ground /pol/, use their room to coordinate “raids” on other servers with ease and impunity. Trolls acquire invite links to other servers and post them in a room called “Raids” (formerly “Raids Defense”), encouraging the chat’s 1000+ members to descend en masse on vulnerable or unsuspecting communities, bringing with them a tidal wave of abuse. Other servers have rooms for doxxing—the posting of personally identifying information like addresses and phone numbers of victims. Such behavior is a clear violation of Discord’s Terms of Service, though it seems those rules cannot be presently enforced.
I recently started a Discord server (an odd term for a set of chat rooms and and not an actual physical or virtual piece of hardware) for the ioquake3 and iodoom3 communities, to see if that would help those communities stay current with gaming culture. Those communities have been fortunate enough to not be harassed via Discord, yet, but they have been targeted in the past by people from Reddit and 4Chan.
Reddit and 4Chan have been responsible for allowing hate groups to form for years, and only removing hate groups when it becomes fiscally irresponsible to continue hosting them. It sounds like Discord has the same problem. The leaders of these businesses don’t value responsible community management, and aren’t punished for it unless users and communities leave.
