Discord shuts down Nazi accounts following Charlottesville violence

Khari Johnson
Updated

Gamer voice and chat app Discord today announced it has shut down a server for altright.com, another associated with The Daily Stormer, and removed a number of groups and accounts associated with violence that took place this weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia that left one dead and 19 injured. The closure of Discord accounts hosted by the service comes hours after GoDaddy then Google removed Nazi blog The Daily Stormer from their domain hosting services.

Discord removed the accounts from the chat app for violating Discord guidelines and terms of service, the site said. It has more than 45 million users, and it’s becoming one of the top options for in-game voice chat.

“Discord was built to bring people together through a love of gaming and our mission is to connect positive communities who share this appreciation,” a company spokesperson said in a statement shared with VentureBeat in an email. “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 as well as the server linked to The Daily Stormer both violated those terms and were 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.”

The company declined to provide specifics on the number of accounts, groups, or servers shut down.

Prior to the events in Charlottesville, Airbnb denied service to white supremacist groups planning to take part in protests against the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

Like GoDaddy, Facebook, and several other tech companies, Discord has been criticized in the past for allowing groups to operate on its platform that carry out online abuse or espouse discrimination and hate.

Updated 3:39 p.m. to include additional details and statement from Discord.