One company took down thousands of internet communities for violent extremism in 2020: report
In a newly-released transparency report, the company Discord revealed combating a massive increase in violent extremism during the second half of 2020.
Discord is an internet community platform with over 250 million users in it's communities, which it refers to as servers.
"Amid standard operational insights about Discord's second half of 2020, a few details stood out. For one, the overall number of user reports increased pretty steadily across 2020—from 26,886 in January to 65,103 in December—with the number initially jumping up in March. This makes sense; people were trapped in their homes, and Discord was growing rapidly as a result," Kotaku reported Monday.
"Discord also pointed out that of reports made, it most frequently took action against issues involving child harm material, cybercrime, doxxing, exploitative content, and extremist or violent content. 'This may be partly explained by the team's prioritization of issues in 2020 that were most likely to cause damage in the real world,' the company said in the transparency report," Kotaku noted. "Indeed, according to the report, Discord removed over 1,500 servers for violent extremism in the second half of 2020, which it said was 'nearly a 93% increase from the first half of the year.' It cited groups like the Boogaloo Boys and QAnon as examples."
The publication quoted from Discord's report.
"This increase can be attributed to the expansion of our anti-extremism efforts as well as growing trends in the online extremism space," the company wrote. "One of the online trends observed in this period was the growth of QAnon. We adjusted our efforts to address the movement—ultimately removing 334 QAnon-related servers."
Read the full report.