‘Problematic pockets’: How Discord became a home for extremists
< < Go Back
After white supremacists used Discord to plan the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, company executives promised to clean up the service.
The chat platform built for gamers banned prominent far-right groups, built a trust and safety team and started marketing to a more diverse set of users.
The changes garnered attention — Discord was going mainstream, tech analysts said — but they papered over the reality that the app remained vulnerable to bad actors, and a privacy-first approach left the company in the dark about much of what took place in its chatrooms.
Into that void stepped Jack Teixeira, the young Air National Guard member from Massachusetts who allegedly exploited Discord’s lack of oversight and content moderation to share top-secret intelligence documents for more than a year.
More From The Washington Post (subscription required):
Rss Feed