Discord

Jason Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy, two software developers, co-founded Discord in 2015 as a communication tool for gamers. More than 80 percent of conversations on Discord take place in what the company calls “smaller spaces” — such as invite-only communities and direct messages between users. There, Discord’s moderation presence is minimal or, outside of narrow cases, effectively nonexistent. After white supremacists used Discord to plan the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, company executives promised to clean up the service. Into that void stepped Jack Teixeira, the young Air National Guard member from Massachusetts who allegedly exploited Discord’s lack of oversight and content moderation to share top-secret intelligence documents for more than a year. Discord executives say no one ever reported to them that Teixeira was sharing classified material on the platform. But according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees, moderators and researchers, the company’s rules and culture allowed a racist and antisemitic community to flourish. Discord’s troubles are not unique in Silicon Valley. In November 2023, The Washington Post reviewed more than a half dozen servers on Discord, discoverable through links on the open web, which featured swastikas and other Nazi iconography, videos of beheadings and gore, and bots that counted the number of times users used the n-word. The company has also struggled to stem child exploitation on the platform. WarnerMedia (then TimeWarner) invested $20 million in Discord in January 2016. AT&T acquired WarnerMedia Investment Group and sold its equity in 2019. In December 2018, the company reported receiving $150 million at a valuation of $2 billion. Greenoaks Capital led the round, which included Firstmark, Tencent, IVP, Index Ventures, and Technology Opportunity Partners. Before receiving new funding in August 2021, Discord reported $130 million in 2020 revenues, a threefold increase over the previous year, and had an estimated $15 billion valuation. There were discussions about a sale to Microsoft at that time.