Discord CEO Puts the Boots to Alt-Right Haters
What a weekend. Jesus. In response to the tragedy in Charlottesville, many CEOs on Trump’s advisory council have resigned in protest of Trump’s piss-poor handling of the situation. But one CEO and company is taking matters into their own hands: Discord is shutting down alt-right servers and monitoring hate speech across other Discord servers.
The company announced on Twitter today that it shut down the altright.com server, one of the largest Discord servers infamous for hate speech, and banned a number of the users active on the server. The company said it will continue to take a stance against “white supremacy, nazi ideology, and all forms of hate.”
CEO Jason Citron said the company will continue to be aggressive in its ongoing investigations into servers that violate Discord’s terms of service and promote hateful content or incite violence:
“Discord was built to bring people together through a love of gaming and our mission is to connect positive communities who share this appreciation. We unequivocally condemn white supremacy, neonazism, or any other group, term, ideology that is based on these beliefs. They are not welcome on Discord. While we don’t read people’s private servers our Terms of Service explicitly forbid harassment, threatening messages, or calls to violence. When hatred like this violates our community standards we act swiftly to take servers down and ban individual users. The public server linked to AltRight.com that violated those terms was shut down along with several other public groups and accounts fostering bad actors on Discord. We will continue to be aggressive to ensure that Discord exists for the community we set out to support – gamers.”
One site that’s been targeted since June is Centipede Central, where users doxxed a list of anti-Trump activists. According to Citron, they are working closely with the security team to shut down servers that violate the terms and conditions of the company.
Centipede Central? Like, the arcade game? Is this code for something? Are all old-school video game forums full of Nazis? What about Galaga? Oh God, WHAT ABOUT Galaga??