Like any major social media platform, Discord has its fair share of unsavory elements using its services. As Kotaku notes, alt-right groups have been known to use Discord to coordinate their hate campaigns and harass particular targets online.
Discord's current moderation tools allow it to shut down hate groups when they spring up, but it's a manual process that relies on humans reporting bad behavior. However, Discord is about to add a powerful new weapon in its fight against hate and harassment.
Earlier this week, Sentropy CEO John Redgrave announced that his company had just been acquired by Discord to help moderate that massive chat platform.
"Three years after starting this company with Michele, Ethan, and Taylor, I’m thrilled to announce that we’re joining Discord to continue fighting against hate and abuse on the internet," said Redgrave. "While we anticipated a decade-long company-building journey, we were presented with the opportunity to instantly alter the scale of our impact and we could not be more excited by the fact that Discord represents a monumental leap forward for us."
Sentropy is a tech startup dedicated to creating “a better internet.” It sprang up in June of last year offering AI-powered chat moderation tools for large businesses and a free consumer-facing tool to help detect and protect offensive content on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Called Sentrop Protect, the free consumer service is now scheduled to shut down thanks to the Discord purchase.
Redgrave said that his team’s focus at Discord “will be on helping Discord expand and evolve its T&S [Trust & Safety] capabilities; we are also inspired by Discord’s commitment to knowledge-sharing and capability-building in the content moderation space, as exemplified by their Moderator Academy."
Harassment and hate speech is a big problem--just ask Twitch, which recently announced it hired an outside law firm to investigate harassment claims on its platform. With Discord working its way into things like PlayStation and Halo Infinite, the need for better tools to combat harassment has never been greater.