Red light to Discord, the social network that becomes the new enemy in Russia and Türkiye

The Russian telecommunications regulator, Roskomnadzor, announced on Tuesday the 8th that it banned the application due to violations of the requirements of Russian legislation to prevent it from being used “for terrorist and extremist purposes.”

Specifically, he noted that the company has refused to remove 947 illegal materials, including “child pornography, calls to extremism, involvement of adolescents in illegal actions, instigation to suicide, LGBT propaganda and promotion of drug use”.

Just one day later, on Wednesday the 9th, a court in Ankara – the capital of Turkey – made a similar decision by blocking access to Discord as a precautionary measure. in relation to some cases of sexual exploitation of minors on this social network.

The rise of Discord

This almost simultaneous blocking is one of the biggest setbacks that the American company has suffered since its founding in 2015. Created from the ashes of the failed video game studio “Hammer & Chisel”, Discord is the fruit of the minds of programmers Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy in his attempt to come up with a platform for video game fans to communicate simply and clearly while playing online, offering services such as text and voice chat, video calls and even live streaming. A successful effort, since according to Statista, by January 2023 Discord had around 563 million registered users and about 154 million monthly active users, numbers that have clearly continued to grow to date.

Unlike other social networks where everyone has a personal page to share news or vacation photos, Discord offers servers, that is, chat rooms that are free to enter or by invitation that are organized around various interests. When the platform was young, these were initially focused on the ‘gamer’ activity, but with the increase in popularity it has come to include much broader themes such as hobbies for certain artists or sports teams, as well as more specific interests and, in some cases , unacceptable.

It is precisely the diversification of these interests that has put the company ‘in the red’ in Russia and Turkey, with the Ankara Prosecutor’s Office alleging that last Saturday the 5th in one of these spaces there were photographs and videos of minors of a sexual nature, as well as attitudes of harassment towards children.

It is not the first time that Discord has been criticized for its lack of actions to protect its users from inappropriate content or from being used by extremist groups to organize their activities. It also happened in 2017, when ultranationalist groups used the platform to organize their Unite the Right demonstration in Charlottesville (Virginia).without the platform taking action until after the registered riots.

Based on the criticism, Discord has taken more seriously to regulate the actions of its users, reinforcing the platform’s community directives and even publishing quarterly reports of its actions against harmful elements on its platform.

“At Discord, security is one of our top priorities and commitments. Approximately 15% of our employees work in a cross-functional team ensuring users have a safe experience and make Discord the best place to hang out with friends,” notes the Discord website, although these actions do not seem to have satisfied authorities in Moscow and Ankara.

Simultaneous, but different

To delve deeper into the topic, The Commerce consulted with Erick Iriarte, a lawyer specializing in digital law. In the expert’s opinion, despite the temporal coincidence, the blocking of Discord in Russia and Türkiye responds to different reasons.

In the first case, Moscow likely blocked Discord in an attempt to prevent the platform from being used as a tool to override limitations on freedom of expression in the country.something that appears more and more feasible if you take into account that the Russian authorities have blocked other social networks such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and X since their invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022.

“Discord is not a messaging service in the strict sense and that may be the problem. Since in Russia users use this platform to bypass blocks that may be in other messaging applications, then it makes some sense that they cut off access,” Iriarte considers. “Meanwhile, in Turkey it makes more sense that it is an issue of child protection, something that enters into the problem of how to regulate a cross-border world in a specific territory, but that is already part of a larger discussion.”

This difference makes the future of Discord in these countries also different, with Iriarte opining that Turkey will probably demand from the company a type of content control tool and a sanction for its return, which would be shortly, while in the In the case of Russia, the blockade may possibly be longer and even permanent.

“If the argument is that they are using it for issues of freedom of expression or issues that affect the State, Moscow is going to demand that it be given access to monitor the activities of users as a condition to allow the return of Discord to the country,” he indicated. . “It is very similar to what happened with the Telegram app in France, which is in a certain sense an inverse version of this case.”.

Is the game over?

Curiously, one of the groups that has most protested the blocking of Discord in Russia is also one of the most aligned with Moscow’s interests: military bloggers, who allege that the platform is used by Russian drone operators for their operations in Ukraine.

According to a Bloomberg article, the popular Telegram channel Fighterbomber – dedicated to the Russian air force – called Moscow’s decision “a stab in the back,” arguing that state bureaucrats are “far from reality, the people and , unfortunately, from the army.”

Another channel called Rybar told its more than 1.3 million subscribers on Telegram that the Discord block leaves some command centers without drone transmissions and regretted that “the Ministry of Defense does not seek to offer troops an alternative.”

But perhaps the person who expressed the situation most succinctly was the Russian analyst Roman Alekhine, who regretted that a civilian decision would so seriously damage Russian military operations. “Do they really want to win there?” [en Ucrania]?”, he asked rhetorically on his Telegram channel.