What Is Discord, the Social App Where Pentagon Documents Were Found?

What is a Discord server?

Discord is similar to the workplace tool Slack. There is no central social feed or timeline with posts for users to scroll through. Instead, it is split into servers — essentially, chat rooms — designed for specific groups or interests. Those servers are divided further into individual, topic-based channels.

Users can join public Discord servers, some of which have millions of members. Some servers are dedicated to discussion of specific games, like League of Legends or Fortnite, while others are communities for people to discuss art, music or artificial intelligence. They are similar to Facebook groups.

There are also private Discord servers, which require an invitation to join. These are often smaller communities, sometimes for a group of friends to message one another while they are online, just like an iMessage group chat. Because of the nature of these small, private servers, they often lack the moderation or platform oversight that a larger public server would have.

What are Discord’s content moderation policies?

Discord has faced several controversies over the years regarding harmful content on its platform, including white nationalists organizing the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 on Discord servers, and the shooter who killed 10 people at a Buffalo grocery store posting his plans and racist messages on the platform before his attack last year.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/10/business/what-is-discord-pentagon-leak.html