Discord has expanded its Hateful Conduct Policy to explicitly include prohibitions against misgendering and deadnaming in a policy update. Accompanying this policy update, Discord has also implemented a comprehensive warning system to enforce these guidelines effectively.
Obligatory XKCD for the folks who keep citing the 1st Amendment 🙄:
If you want to be a hatful person online or in person, there’s nothing stopping you from starting your own little online utopia- VPSs are pretty cheap, after all. You’ll quickly find, however, that you probably attract a large number of assholes and, in all likelihood, either find yourself moderating content or shutting down just like every other “free speech” bastion.
Which is fine. I’m a firm believer in free speech. If bigots want to have a place to talk to one another, that’s their prerogative and their right. What they don’t have is a right to force others to host or listen to their bullshit, which appears to be what they want.
Content-based moderation is neither new nor pernicious, folks. So long as those doing it don’t hold a monopoly on the use of force, you remain free to vote with your feet, wallet, eyeballs, and ears.
Telling diet Nazis to go fuck themselves is an appropriate use of power, but any power can be abused. You have an underlying moral right to free expression. That’s the reason behind the first amendment. It is not a gift from the state.
What makes Discord’s choice okay is freedom of association. Most people don’t want to deal with diet Nazis. It is fine for most businesses to exclude diet Nazis, whether or not anyone asked them to.
But nobody would tut ‘Discord’s not a government’ if they’d banned trans-rights advocacy. And that’s fine. There’s no hypocrisy in it. You understand businesses can do harm, individually and in bulk, through their decisions. Silencing reasonable opinions, expressed politely, is almost always censorship we should fight. There’s just nothing reasonable or polite about being a goddamn fascist.
I mean, I’m a trans woman and I would indeed say “Discord’s not a government” if they adopted such an asinine policy. I’d also probably be fairly critical of those continuing to use it.
I agree that silencing speech is a bad thing. I’m just not sure that I agree that moderation on any particular site is silencing speech. We’re all free to use the sites we like. While I might think your putative policy of banning trans advocacy is imprudent, I would still respect the right of a host to have such a policy (while maintaining my own right to boycott/criticize).
I can’t respect that libertarian attitude. It is intolerable for any business to endorse bigotry and prohibit criticism of bigotry - especially a business whose purpose is people talking to one another. How could that be anything but censorship?
Saying so doesn’t require outlawing forums run by assholes, for assholes. Your church or bulletin board or whatever can be as racist and sexist as you please. But businesses are openly forbidden from excluding certain groups. Stormfront can say “no Catholics.” Walmart plainly can’t.
Oh good, so they plan to actually start enforcing their policies? Because I’ve never seen it happen, and I’ve reported users who explicity called for violence against LGBT+ people and black people.
Yeah, I understand your scepticism. At least, they have a system in place for enforcement now. If they have the moderators to actually use it is a different question…
I was a moderator of a gaming server with 2k people. I quit modding and left the server over this.
I’ve not once seen Discord enforce their policies. In fact, I can still look back in my DM history and see active users who have made clear and explicit threats with a side of slurs to black and LGBT+ people. No action whatsoever on their part, even though I did my diligence by reporting them.
Yo those messages might also be crimes btw 😊
Discord never had freedom of speech to begin with, but isn’t this extreme? People should be able to say what they want privately in their own servers. Brigading and harassment in DMs is already banned.
You do not have a right to free speech on the property of a private business. A restaurant can kick you out for being an asshole. A tech company can kick you off their servers for being an asshole.
Private servers are moderated all the time. Just look at the piracy prevention that goes on.
Discord does not use e2e encryption meaning they can do whatever they want with the content you share not only with your friends but with the company. They can use the guise of safety (eg we found a private server planning terrorism) to extend this access to everything. Since the company can read everything on the platform, they’re carrying a serious set of risks and liability with all of that potentially bad or illegal content. By creating policies like this, they can sidestep litigation (to an extent) when bad content is found by pointing to policies and handwavy enforcement. It might not be illegal to deadname (at least in the US); that does not stop civil litigation.
Given that fuck all is going to change, I view this primarily as a risk reduction strategy that most people will misconstrue as social good. That’s a really cynical take. I’m pretty cynical about the motives of massive orgs beyond risk management.
It only seems that way because their enforcement is so poor, I’m kind of wondering myself if this is going to change anything or if they’re not enforcing anything and just putting this up as a front it doesn’t mean a whole lot.
so that’s why they added pronouns
Finally justice against people who keep assuming I’m a guy online.
I hope that doesn’t include Twitter :D
what does this comment mean
It means we all dead name x
its not deadnaming when its a company
a company does not deserve the same amount of basic respect an actual person does, nor does a company have the same rights
I just like to say, “I’ll stop deadnaming Twitter when musk stops deadnaming his daughter.”
exactly!
