According to a new transparency report released by Discord, the VoIP service provider has banned over four million accounts for a number of notorious reasons. The reasons include spamming, harassing, breaking server community guidelines, and criminal activities. These bans were carried out over the first six months of 2020.
Discord has been very busy this year due to so many people being stuck at home, and the company has received more complaints from users in comparison to 2019. This year alone, around 235,000 complaints were reported to Discord's Trust & Safety team. These complaints ranged from harassment to cybercrime. The former makes up for the majority of the list with 86,048 reports, but according to Discord, it's also the hardest one to tackle.
"We get some reports of malicious ban evading and flooding of friend requests, which generally are actionable, but a lot more of someone calling someone else names, or even filing a report under harassment and simply stating that they don’t like the other person or what they say, which is not actionable by Trust & Safety and is more appropriately addressed by the complainant blocking a user they don’t like," Discord said.
Spam seems to be the easiest one to deal with as 65.72 percent of reported complaints were addressed with some kind of action. The company has banned 4,083,444 spam accounts between January and June. After spam, accounts sharing exploitative content were among the second-highest reason for bans. Accounts banned for exploitative content make up only eight percent of complaints.
Discord has also stated that it is currently working on some projects to make the service safer. The company is looking at implementing spam reducing features, making reporting easier, and assisting moderators. These features are said to be getting announced over the next few months. The company is also planning to publish transparency reports every six months, and the next report will be shared in January 2021.
