Discord has been banning offending users and servers almost non-stop.

You can read transparency reports on Discord’s website since 2019, and the decentralised social platform’s security team has not been idle in the first six months of 2022. Quarterly reports are published, and from January to June 2022, 55,573,411 accounts have been deactivated, and although the number of server deletions was not in the millions, 68,379 were still dumped. According to Discord, most accounts deactivated had spamming or related to spamming offences.

If we look beyond spam to the offenders, the number of accounts disabled plummets to 1,821,721. At the same time, server data cannot be disclosed, as Discord’s policy is that they cannot spam. Still, rather unsolicited content, platform manipulation and illegal activities are why they end up deleted. Of the categories of server and account bans that cannot be linked to spam, the largest is child safety, followed by exploitative and unsolicited content. Discord moderators only watch chatlogs and server broadcasts occasionally.

The last few years have seen a massive increase in preventing extreme and illegal activities on Discord, with child abuse and hate content receiving the most attention. The New York State Attorney General launched an investigation into hate speech platforms (such as Discord) following a massacre earlier this year. Most post-ban appeals have been rejected: only 2% in the first quarter and 0.6% (!) in the second have been reversed. So, out of 235,945 appeals, only 3098 people could use Discord on their affected account again…

For reports, Discord responded to 24% of them in the first quarter, then 22% in the second. It doesn’t include the plethora of one-click (well, more: right-click on the message, report message, then select the topic you think is relevant…) reports. What’s rough is that most of the spammers aren’t even reported by users. Of the 27,733,948 accounts banned in Q2, only 7,785,111 were reported, which is about a quarter! Discord weeds them out before they are reported…

Still, quite a few servers have been closed…

Source: PCGamer