Discord Can Be Held Accountable - #ChangeDiscord ?
Hi everyone, apologies for the absence of late and sporadic online presence. I have been gearing up for a return to full time employment and have had little time to devote to my investigative reporting. The latest news regarding a quite new and very successful social media platform was enough for me to get back to it though. I have some bombshells for you all :-)
I have deliberated over the publication of this article and the evidence I will present in it . Finally, I decided to publish as much as I could by acting on the pretense of good will and harm reduction. After all, I have been meticulously saving all my reporting and referrals to Social Media Trust and Safety teams, along with the relevant law enforcement agencies for a reason. That reason is to instill transparency and accountability where it is currently lacking.
It is important to me that none of the following information will endanger any existing legal action or the possibility for future legal action so I have censored a good deal of identifying information. Please understand that by doing so, I am exposing to you what a whole bunch of us who use platforms such as Discord are faced with often. You are not alone in your frustrations and concerns, and there is no reason why we shouldn't voice our experiences interacting with such Trust and Safety teams.
So with this in mind, let us go forth and try to understand what Discord is doing, what Discord is avoiding and what has happened recently on Discord with significant consequences to all users on the platform.
4th February 2019. Two Discord Trust and Safety Team Senior employees become embroiled in furry and cub porn (of all things...) and how it is sanctioned on their platform.
Recent news involving Discord and some issues regarding the Trust and Safety's team ambivalent enforcement of their community guidelines has piqued my interest enough to write this article. I personally do not give a flying fuck about the sordid Furry subculture and their predilection for cartoon pornography but with this receiving a good deal of attention, I felt that it was a diversion. I truly believe that Discord can be held accountable, not just for their Trust and Safety Team's questionable interpretation of what is allowable pornography on their platform, but far more harmful activities occurring on their platform that targets minors and exploits its users.
On the 4th February, Twitter user @**nickmon1112 ** published a long string of tweets which got a whole lot of attention. Kudos to Nick who is a grassroots self made journalist that does some great investigation into current issues online that 'institutional journalists' and legacy media barely touched. We need more people like Nick.
Ok. so there's trouble brewing down in the ol' Discord neck of the woods. pic.twitter.com/w8icAtO0zf
— Nick Monroe () February 4, 2019
There is a whole heap of additional information coming out constantly so it's worth going through his more recent tweets to see what else is being uncovered.
- Newsweek recently covered this furry scandal & other questionable conduct on the 7th February 2019. It's basically a rehash of Nick's work.
Here is also a fantastically funny video clip by @BrintRevised shared on twitter. As far as I know this is where the #ChangeDiscord hashtag originated.
#ChangeDiscord pic.twitter.com/iSl9QFbeWa
— BeanRevised @NYC (@BrintRevised) February 5, 2019
Take note of how @BrintRevised mentions Discord sneakily changed it's terms and conditions October 2018 to absolve any of it's users for holding Discord liable for anything occurring on its platform. Keep this date in mind.
This article is closer to what my concerns are and why I am pursuing accountability. Any savvy consumer of current events should be questioning when an article that contains major allegations like this barely warrants a mention in mainstream media circles. Personally I get very irate that publishing an article containing information that could prevent harm to its users by spreading awareness of danger receives minimal attention. Why the suppression? Is not child online safety important or a priority for Discord?
Discord, like most social media platforms that rapidly burgeoned to become a global fixture, has a reputation to uphold and lip-service spin doctoring to maintain the illusion of being a cool hip place that's safe and fun. Discord, like all social media platforms with minors on the platform (Children under the age of 13), becomes a homing beacon for child exploitation and pedophilic grooming. Whilst this criticism of Discord has been labelled as #ChangeDiscord, my attitude is hold Discord accountable for what is happening.
I would not be surprised if Discord is facing an internal crisis of epic legal implications and perhaps even lawsuits. They are intentionally suppressing information regarding illegal conduct on their platform, when it should be a priority to make a public service announcement to it's +200,000,000 users. This is unforgiveable when a platform such as Discord is specifically catering to children and teenagers as a core demographic.
Social Media, Child Sexual Exploitation, Grooming and Blackmail.
I am a member of an online group https://steemit.com/@ex-exploitation whose aim is to spread awareness and educate the public on dangers facing children online. The group's current focus is on Youtube's Livestreaming facility but my investigations have been broader than just Youtube.
Throughout my participation in Exposing Exploitation, it became starkly obvious that child online safety is not being treated as a priority and not through the focal point of Child Exploitation that occurs on massive global social media platforms daily. My aim is to bring to the forefront the neglectful attitude of social media companies in tackling this problem and how incredibly opaque the process of referring to further investigative agencies is.
This is incredibly frustrating for someone who is all too acquainted with such glaring gaps in responsibility by mutli-billion dollar companies. Internal Trust and Safety teams are not being held accountable for doing the right thing or providing a complete level of transparency which empowers concerned users that their efforts in reporting both to Discord and the appropriate authorities achieves something.
To give a perfect example: A company which employs Trust and Safety moderators that are more concerned with the correct terminology to distinguish fetish niche porn cartoon animals of dubious portrayed ages, than providing assistance or further information regarding the very serious issues of criminal activity I was reporting HAS IT'S PRIORITIES WRONG. This is also an example of why furries are cancer and do not belong in any moderating position which requires sound moral judgement.
The Bored Group Criminal activity that is highly organized and of a very serious nature exists on Discord.
The Bored Group is one such shocking case that came to my attention in early January 2019 when this group's ringleader, Christian Maire, was set upon and beaten to death after being incarcerated in a Michigan federal prison. This horrific case involved a gang of 9 Adult pedophile men from USA and Canada working as a gang to efficiently groom, blackmail, sextort and procure child pornography on social media platforms. The case and it's sophisticated level of operation reads like a especially dark crime novel.
I quote the Assistant US Attorney, Matthew Schneider:
- This group did not invent the sexual exploitation of children, but they may have perfected it.
The indictment makes for harrowing reading. The sentencing memorandum of the ringleader Christian Maire is enough to give you nightmares. These pedophiles used social media platforms such as Periscope, MyLoL, Discord and various others in several ways, such as;
- a base of operations online which held child victim details and links, rules and methodology,
- "hunting grounds" for child victims,
- places to procure, trade and possibly even sell the child pornography collected from their evil exploitative enterprise.
- Livestreaming facilities to entice the child victims to record their own child pornography to satisfy the Bored Group members' that had tricked them into believing they were young handsome boys.
Their highly organized modus operandi, along with the variety of unmonitored or insufficiently monitored platforms used by them meant that the female minor victims who fell prey to the Bored Group numbered over 100. Some of these child victims have still not been identified from the child exploitation material that the girls were coerced into producing for their groomers. These children are still suffering from the complete mental distress, coercion and states of duress they were subjected to by the cruel Bored Group. They delighted in targeting the most vulnerable and already mentally unwell children as they were easier to cruelly manipulate.
The Bored Gang held an age preference for 13 - 17 year old vulnerable, lonely and suicidal young girls, purposefully seeking these vulnerable children and teens to trick them into thinking they were an equivalent age young teen boy wanting to befriend them. It is a nightmare to think about what hell it must have been for these child victims to realize the text and fake images on the screen were not their boyfriends, or any friend at all.
It is a very nefarious, methodical and disciplined enterprise the pedophiles participated in. They ran this online child sexual exploitation syndicate for around 5 years all the while evading arrest or detection. They ran it on several platforms; migrating from one to another as new social media platforms were created or closed and as social media platform popularity for their preferred target age group changed.
Some chat logs of the Bored Group's group chat on Discord are quoted in the sentencing memorandum. They are vile and putrid to read so I will leave it to the reader to read it at their own behest.
The last social media platform the Bored Group used before finally being tracked and arrested was Discord however it appears that "hunting" for victims was not what the group was using Discord for. It is possible such crimes still occurred despite the lack of evidence for this in the Sentencing Memorandum USA vs Christian Maire and I say that based on my own harrowing interaction with a group very similar to the Bored Group.
Discord Issued Search Warrant
This is another case of child sexual exploitation and grooming on Discord that was made public in the earlier linked Forbes Article is available here. The document is a Search Warrant dated 4th May 2017 that was issued to Discord seeking their data to use as evidence of a pedophile who groomed a 12 year old girl via Discord and other messaging apps. He met her in person after she ran away from home and had sexual intercourse several times.
The publication of this search warrant seems unusual to me and I have yet to scrutinize what it could mean, particularly for Discord and what their data retention policies are for their users. Something to mull over...
Interacting with the Discord Trust and Safety Team
| Beals - Furry Discord Trust and Safety | allthefoxes - Furry Discord Trust and Safety too |
|---|---|
I guffawed with glibness when I realised that the two furry mods who are being poleaxed for their questionable furry pornography affinities were the mods who responsed to my past reports sent to the Trust and Safety Team.
I had reported instances of:
- death threats,
- a pedophile openly admitting to hosting a server full of child pornography,
- a very large publicly listed server wholly focused on pornography, sexual solicitation and financial exploitation as a fetish and lastly,
- a grooming gang who were enticing a female minor victim to harm herself with the intent to commit suicide on Youtube Livestreams. They were co-ordinating the verbal abuse in the Youtube livestream chat, the recording of the livestream as she cut her wrists and held a replica pistol to her head and planning their concerted group efforts to bully her into suicide in a Discord private group chat.
Below will be the trail of reporting and correspondence twith the Discord Trust and Safety Team that I filed. Prepare to be appalled as the realization dawns that these furry moderators were more interested in keeping me quiet with their hollow assertions that proper protocols were being followed, than very serious crimes occurring on their platforms.
Discord Hype Squad & The Grooming Gang
This was the most distressing personal experience for me and I still find it hard to talk about without feeling very emotional. Our group Exposing Exploitation was actively monitoring a child on YouTube livestream noting her anxious, sullen and emotional state. A member informed us that she had tried cutting her wrists a few weeks ago on the livestream whilst being bullied and goaded to do so in the livestream.
This was very concerning so we used open source intelligence techniques and reviewing her uploaded videos to gain further information on a proximate location, county, state and family members. This girl seemed to improve so we left it at that.
A few weeks later, the girl started livestreaming continuously and I witnessed it happening by chance. The thumbnail to her livestream videos were of her pointing a replica pistol (we didn't know it was a replica at the time) with the barrel inside her mouth, as if to blow her brains out. The title of the video was along the lines "I'm going to kill myself". She appeared to be around 12-13
I panicked and ran from a friend's house to get home and review the previous intelligence we had gathered. I loaded up my cell phone with international call credit and called what we deduced was the local PD in that county. Whilst I was trying to keep it together watching this girl slice her wrists, being goaded into committing suicide and becoming completely distraught, I stumbled upon a private group chat on discord where the livestream bullies were co-ordinating their verbal enticement of suicide and recording their victim's YouTube livestream of her cutting and bleeding.
I managed to archive their group chat within the ten seconds it took for them to kick and ban me. I also had their Message IDs, discord user ID's and the group chat ID which is required to lodge a report properly to Discord.
To my utter disgust I observed this group of absolute scum's behavior to the poor girl and what they were saying to her in Youtube livestream, and how they laughed behind her back in the Discord private group chat. I was beyond appalled.
There was a stroke of luck though... A very blessed and heaven-sent event happened when the local PD I rang moments earlier in the livestreaming girl's neighborhood had one of their police officers call her and speak to her so she wouldn't cut herself further.
I calmed down and changed my focus now that immediate harm to the young girl was halted. With the all too recent memory of the Bored Group in my head, I set about reporting to several different law authorities and agencies in the USA, methodically and with detail. I referenced the Bored Group case and how this was nearly identical except the enticement was to commit self-harm and not create child pornography on livestream. I linked all the relevant information and links from Youtube. I linked the strange filesharing host site which the grooming gang immediately uploaded their recording of the girl self-harming during her livestream so the grooming gang members could all download it.
I linked the girl's thank you livestream video to the policeman who rang and spoke to her and I shed some tears when it hit me that it was me and my amazing colleagues in Exposing Exploitation who were able to intervene in this case. And we made an immediate difference to this girl's life, despite her being subjected to a vile group of evil creatures that were determined to see her harm herself on livestream.
Here is my report to Discord's Trust and Safety Team which I made after contacting Youtube, A special taskforce, NCMEC and the local Police Department where the girl lived. Please excuse the sloppy screencapping:
Here is the response I received from Discord's Trust and Safety team regarding my report to them. It was very disappointing and was the worst quality response I had ever received from them. Please read the email from bottom to top.
Once the dust settled, I looked further into the logs and the members of the Grooming gang. Lo and behold some of these vile creatures were members of Discord's cheerleading initiative, The HypeSquad . This was the first time I came across members of HypeSquad and I quickly surmised it was a way for Discord to provide an avenue for users to feel somewhat more involved in the wellbeing of the platform. In reality, it's a status badge that is pinned to your user profile that has no effect and which anyone can apply for.
I initially thought that the HypeSquad was something like Youtube's Trusted Flagger program, an entrusted position selectively recruited for but after I became a HypeSquad member by completing a nonsensical series of five multiple questions, I realized there was no merit or test applied to who can become a HypeSquad member. Still, it looks fucking terrible that there are HypeSquad members that actively participate in grooming and exploiting young children on the Discord platform.
| Fuck these guys. | |
|---|---|
Findom Sexual Solicitation Server and Financial / Fetish Extortion
It was a few months ago when I first heard of pay pigging and findom. Both are the fetishization of financial exploitation and enslavement. I have no issues with idiots getting off on being financially drained as some sort of online psychosexual form of pleasure but when it occurs on a platform mainly catering to children and young teens, it is an issue. There were also many financial transactions occurring in this server with unknown taxable status.
I found this server using a public discord search engine and was pretty shocked to find it absolutely brimming with all manner of pornography, not just findoms and pay pigs. Some of the pornography was pretty extreme, if not downright illegal. I had to report it because I believed if I was able to find it with absolutely no difficulty or age verification, any minor could.
This was my first time compiling a detailed report to Trust & Safety so I had to be tutored on the correct method to do so.
Here is my correspondence with Beals and allthefoxes from Discord's Trust and Safety Team. Please read the email from bottom to top.
And here is an uploaded log of the findom channel in the findom server(196MB.pdf), dating from 19th November 2017 to 25th November 2018. I know I said at the commencement of this article that I would be astute in my application of censoring and redacting but I am not protecting victims or survivors here. Infact by exposing this log in full, I would hope Discord eventually is pushed to act upon what you can see in the log as being exploitative behavior and just shit people begging for money off strangers.
Dangerous self-confessed Pedophile with his own "P-Gang" Server on Discord
Came across a real old school pedophile on discord. He seemed to be an oldfag from the way back era of when anime-filled imageboards and sexualized japanese anime images were a new phenomena on the internet.
I can't be bothered posting his logs or screencaps as you can imagine what it is like to talk to someone obsessed with loli, candydoll, hentai etc and trying to pass themselves off as one of those good loving pedophiles that would never hurt a child.
He was an awful human being and Discord was committed to remaining tight lipped regarding any ongoing investigation. Discord refused to answer my simple queries to at least assuage my concerns that there is a very revolting pedophile active on their platform. His sickly claims of being the owner of a server called P-Gang which specialised in child pornography and the sexualised child-like anime imagery should have been enough for instant banning and referral to law enforcement...
Instead I was left very frustrated that Discord were appearing to sit on their hands about my report because this user was still hassling myself and other members for weeks after the report was lodged with Trust and Safety. This indicated to me that the Trust and Safety Team were uncertain as to how to answer me with any commitment or promise. Part of me almost believes that if the Trust and Safety Team were furries, then they could have been someone like this pedophile whose entire moral compass hinged on his cartoon obsession of sexualised underage cartoon girls not being harmful to children, little girls in particular, whom he loved and would never hurt.
Please read this email correspondence from the bottom up and apologies for any duplication.
Encryption on Discord
Last but not least... I found a server which contained something I've never seen before on Discord. The usage of an encryption plugin to obscure messages that required the download of SimpleDiscordCrypt to decrypt them. I have not installed this plugin I have not interacted with the server and I do not intend to. This was enough of an indication that there is so much going on in this popular social media platform which isn't known or discussed in the wider public.
The existence of this plugin is not an indication in itself that something is being hidden which is likely to be illegal. The channels you can read are harmless looking. Look a little further and then you feel sickened and shut the program in its entirety. I utilized a Discord archiving app to be able to view all the channels in this server without having the permissions to enter them. I also note the rank categories and their strange names and how the creator of the SimpleDiscordCrypt plugin in an admin in this channel.
So what do you think about this? Should I report it to Discord?
CONCLUSION
FUCK DISCORD. THAT IS ALL.
We went to PAX South. We had fun. We had new booth. Look at it here. Please validate us. Or roast us. Say something please. https://t.co/kvxOt4zVNk pic.twitter.com/alpY2AuoSC
— Discord () February 5, 2019