Did you're read the article, and the statement Discord put out? I think the stated reason is the believable.
> Discord says it did not ban the server for financial fraud — rather, it was banned because it continued to allow “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.”
I think at this point every single unpopular or questionable action made by an institution is going to go with a "it's to prevent hate/discrimination" justification. It's an easy way to get a credulous mob on your side; you can always nutpick random examples; and if someone argues against it they just prove they're one of the racists/whatever.
I mean your comment is based on the assumption that hate speech doesn't happen online. in my experience, places like discord and a bunch of subreddits are sweltering with it. it is not surprising at all that something that blew up as fast as this had trouble moderating hate speech out and became a host for it.
I think he’s saying you don’t ban the entire room just because some of the people say naughty words. And also why is someone deciding for me how much risk I can take? Just let me be exposed to hateful speech, I think I can handle it, and if not I can leave. It’s not like they can argue that hearing bad language will overflow their hospital and thus I must be on lockdown just in case.
Nobody disputes that they have the right to make that choice. That doesn't mean it's the right choice.
If your entire justification for something boils down to "I'm technically allowed to do this" it should be pretty obvious that you're doing something shitty.
> I mean your comment is based on the assumption that hate speech doesn't happen online.
How so? "Institutions will publicly blame hate speech as an excuse to do things they wanted to do otherwise" in no way requires an assumption that "hate speech doesn't exist on the internet."
Selective enforcement of laws is an old strategy to legally discriminate. It has been used many times to discriminate against blacks. What makes you think it can't be used to discriminate against other groups, like for example r/WallStreetBets?
Of course we can't say for sure. But at the same time we can't say for sure that specific policemen were actually racist when they attacked black people, or if they would do the same thing against white people in similar situation. You can find statistical patterns there, but similarly you can also find statistical patterns that certain groups on message boards gets banned for less than certain other groups.
The discord for WSB was a bit more than just ablest slurs but the timing of this is just a bad business move unless there's more to it. It doesn't make any real sense from a liability aspect unless they were going to plan some kind of insurrection against the government... you can just as easily ban them for this same reason "multiple warnings" next week. There had to have been external pressure on someone higher up or someone with a stake in the game.
Yeah. I’m no fan of Wall Street but there is definitely a lot of rabid vitriol around, for example, Citron, and I really would not be surprised if people were stepping over the line and calling for violence.
You can take almost any discord down for this, and they often do if it gets reported enough times. In this case it got enough attention so they enforced the rules.
> Discord says it did not ban the server for financial fraud — rather, it was banned because it continued to allow “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.”