Discord removes more than half a million accounts due to child safety concerns

Last week, social platform Discord said it disabled 767,363 accounts for policy violations between April and June 2022.

According to its quarterly safety report, 69% of all the disabled accounts posed Child Safety concerns.

Discord disabled 532,498 accounts and removed 15,163 servers for child safety reasons, most of which were flagged for uploading abuse material (images and videos).

The accounts and servers were also immediately reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC).

“Discord issues warnings with the goal of preventing future violations of our Community Guidelines,” the company explained. “For some high-harm issues such as Violent Extremism or Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) - a subcategory of Child Safety - we do not issue warnings but rather immediately disable the account and remove the content.”

“In the second quarter of 2022, we reported 21,529 accounts to NCMEC, a 101% increase in reports made when compared to the first quarter of 2022,” the report reads. “21,425 of those reports were media (images or videos), of which many were flagged through PhotoDNA – a tool that uses a shared industry hash database of known CSAM. 104 high-harm grooming or endangerment reports were also delivered to NCMEC.”

The company also highlighted that it disabled over 27.5 million accounts for spam or spam-related offenses, a 6.5% increase from the previous analyzed quarter.

Other policy violations that led to account removals include:

· Sending exploitative and unsolicited content or sharing sexually explicit content of other people without their consent - 147,249 accounts and 2,326 servers were disabled

· Harassment and bullying including severe negative comments, and suggestive or overt threats – 13,779 accounts and 598 servers were disabled

· Malicious impersonation of individuals or organizations – 148 accounts and 12 servers were disabled

· Illegal or dangerous activities including selling or facilitating the sale of illegal goods or services - 27,494 accounts and 4,639 servers were removed from this category

· Self-harm concerns or accounts that promote suicide and self-harm – 2,495 accounts and removed 620 servers for self-harm concerns.

Many social media platforms have been tainted by malicious individuals and cybercriminals. Make sure you follow these safety tips to help you stay safe while using Discord.

Parents with kids who use the platform to stay connected with their gaming friends should follow good cyber practices and always report suspicious activities or messages.

To ensure that kids stay away from internet threats and predators, make sure they:

• Never include personally identifiable information when setting up their profile
• Use a secure and unique password that should never be shared with others
• Use the privacy settings to ensure their accounts remain private
• Don’t interact or accept friend requests from strangers
• Don’t respond to hateful speech, bullying and other threatening messages
• Report individuals, servers or accounts that promote self-harm, bullying and other crimes
• Don’t click on links, attachments or other unsolicited correspondence

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