Mapping Discord’s darkside: Distributed hate networks on Disboard
Discord, a popular community chat application, has rhetorically distanced itself from its associations with white supremacist content through a public commitment to proactive moderation. However, Discord relies extensively on third-party services (like bots and server bulletins), which have been overlooked in their role in facilitating hateful networks. This study notes how Discord offloads searchability to server bulletin sites like Disboard, to deleterious effect. This study involves two parts: (1) we use critical technoculture discourse analysis to examine Discord’s blogs, policies, and application programming interface and (2) we present data scraped from 2741 Discord servers listed on Disboard, revealing networks of hateful and white supremacist communities that openly use “edgy,” raiding-oriented, and toxic messaging. These servers exploit Discord’s moderation tools and affordances to proliferate within Discord’s distributed ecology. We argue that Discord’s policies fail to address its reliance on unmoderated third-party services or the networked practices of its toxic communities.