Discord Ban Alt-Right Hate Groups Following Charlottesville Protest

Chat platform Discord has confirmed that they are cancelling a number of accounts and a server associated with alt-right and white supremacist groups, it said in a Twitter Post.

They are taking this action after the events in Charlottesville, Virginia over the weekend where a white supremacist drove a car into a peaceful Anti-racist counter protest which caused the death of one protestor.

This is another example of a tech company striking back against these white supremacist groups. Yesterday, Google and GoDaddy decided to terminate domain registration services to the notorious neo nazi website The Daily Stormer.

“We unequivocally condemn white supremacy, neonazism, or any other group, term, ideology that is based on these beliefs,” Discord CMO Eros Resmini told Polygon today.

“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.”

I expect to see a push by tech companies like Google and Facebook to try and rid their website/search engines of these racist ideologies.