In February, Gizmodo reported that many Discord users were facing abuse and were given no clear recourse. Among the issues endemic to the voice- and text-chat platform was the anonymous and unsolicited dissemination of child pornography, a problem which seems to have only gotten worse.
Image: Discord logo
[referenced url=”https://gizmodo.com.au/2017/02/how-a-video-game-chat-client-became-the-webs-new-cesspool-of-abuse/” thumb=”https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_ku-large/h5jorwso7d7kpz9ziywa.png” title=”How A Video Game Chat Client Became The Web’s New Cesspool Of Abuse” excerpt=”Over 25 million users have flocked to Discord, a text and voice platform for gamers, since its launch in May of 2015. Despite the company raising at least 30 million in venture capital funding, the company has only five “customer experience” personnel and no moderators on its staff. From what I’ve seen, users who wish to engage in harassment, raid servers or bombard chats and users with child pornography suffer no lasting repercussions for doing so. That seemingly any server can become the victim of organised attacks represents the strained and failing infrastructure of moderation — of Discord, and of virtually any community on the internet.”]
Though there has been no official statement on the service’s blog or Twitter account, a number of recent posts on Reddit’s r/discordapp have appeared in the past 24 hours relating to “CP [child porn] botnets“, “porn image spamming“, and server admins mass-alerting their communities to the presence of these nefarious users via copied-and-pasted messages such as this one:
Image: Centipede Central Discord server
“We’re aware of the copy/pasta going around and currently determining the scale and next step to address it,” wrote a Discord Customer Experience employee in response to one such Reddit thread. “In general, rather than spreading this copy/paste message, if you do receive DMs with illegally explicit material, please email abuse@discordapp.com.”
In the time since Gizmodo first reported on the issue I’ve personally received three such unsolicited messages, one of which contained a particularly disturbing image of an infant girl. The user, whose handle was Good Weed, sent it with only the message “hi” and abruptly became unreachable.
On Discord, users can only direct message each other if they’re friends or if they both share a chat server in common. These spammers are able to send messages such as this by joining a particular chat server, direct messaging the individual members, and then quickly leaving to avoid detection.
Image: Privacy settings
To our knowledge, the only recourse users currently have is to disallow direct messaging — a process which needs to be repeated for every single server a particular user is a member of.
We reached out to Discord for comment but had not heard back at time of writing.
If you’ve received such a message, email Discord’s abuse support team along with the user’s tag and ID, a link to the image, and whatever other relevant information you have. Do not save or screenshot the images.