Comment by pteraspidomorph | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pteraspidomorph | Hacker News Reader

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pteraspidomorph

Here's how Discord works. A third or so of its features, such as forum channels (EDIT: I think this specific example was wrong; stage and announcement channels, but not forum channels) or role self-assignment, are locked behind Community Mode. After enabling Community Mode, server owners are NOT ALLOWED to turn off content filtering anymore, meaning that by default, content in every channel may be filtered out by systems you cannot configure.

The only way for the server owner to circumvent the filter is to mark a channel as "NSFW", which doesn't necessarily mean the channel actually contains any NSFW content.

This change will not actually require ID for content confirmed to be NSFW. It will require ID for each and every "NSFW mode" (unfiltered) channel. The end result is that you have three choices:

- Ditch Discord features implemented in recent years (or at least this is currently possible) - this prevents a server from being listed as public;

- Require ID checks from all your users (per channel);

- Have everything scanned from all your users (per channel).

Are you saying that you can "mark" the channel as "NSFW", and Discord will stop scanning your content, possibly allowing you to share very illegal content through their servers?

Sounds weird to me. Pretty sure that they legally have to make sure that they don't host illegal content. Or does "NSFW" enable some kind of end-to-end encryption?

That has always been the case, yes, though I'm not sure what you mean by "illegal" content. There is only a small overlap between NSFW and illegal content, and the NSFW filter has never been concerned with, uh, violating photograph copyright or something.

You don't have to take my word for it, just check it yourself, although it seems that this week, they renamed the NSFW setting to "Age-Restricted Channel" (in preparation for this change, no doubt). The verification-related portion of the behavior I described was implemented for the UK months ago.

The description still contains: "Age-restricted channels are exempt from the explicit content filter."

EDIT: IANAL (or american) but if Discord was policing content for legality rather than age-appropriateness, wouldn't they lose DMCA Safe Harbor protections?

> The description still contains: "Age-restricted channels are exempt from the explicit content filter."

Wait! This does not mean they do not scan it. What I understand from that statement is that they filter explicit content, as in they prevent it from appearing on the user's screen.

When you enable the "NSFW" mode, you tell Discord "it's okay, don't filter out anything". But Discord probably still scans everything.

So that makes sense to me: if you don't validate your age, then Discord will not allow you to join channels that disable the "adult" filtering. I can personally live without adult content on Discord...

OK, but you're not the one making that decision and you don't know/can't control how that decision is being made.

Well you're not using Discord in the hope that they are censorship-resistant, are you? :-)

They can read everything that you send already, if your problem is that they may filter something that they consider NSFW and you don't... well I am not sure how big of a problem that is.

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