This is very much a misunderstanding of the mechanism. The youth are using discord because its convenient, easy to set up, and all of their friends are on there. It also has the structural issue of being an opaque echo chamber, which allows communities to become more ideological as they arent subject to outsider criticism. If it wasn’t discord, it would be Telegram, or Reddit or whatever.
Extremists are using Discord to radicalize American youth, officials warned this year
Submitted 4 weeks ago by return2ozma@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
At least Reddit is structured to be public and searchable (or at least it used to be).
Discord is annoying for a bazillion reasons, but a big one is it’s ostensibly a ‘close friends gamer chat’ platform, yet its taken the role of project support chat, niche topic forums, ‘influencer’ chat rooms, and things that should absolutely be public and searchable.
LillyPip@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
Are the authors of this new to the internet?
This warning is like 15 years too late.
Triumph@fedia.io 4 weeks ago
I'm being radicalized by a fascist government. But I'm not a "youth".
HubertManne@piefed.social 4 weeks ago
Yeah its like. Maybe just maybe the federal government not following its own laws leads to people not following the law.
dinckelman@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Except the extremism comes from within. These people don’t realize they are the wolves
_core@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Extremists are using every medium possible to radicalized the American youth.
NotKyloRen@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
They’re going to try every medium/platform possible. The only way to tackle this is to teach critical thinking. Easier said than done, I know. Otherwise we board up the internet “for the children” (which is currently happening).
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 4 weeks ago
Yeah but mostly the cringe instead of the cool ones
Kolanaki@pawb.social 4 weeks ago
It’s always the platform and never the people using the platform.
Go into a left wing chat, you might get radicalized to the left.
Go into a right wing chat, and you might get radicalized to the right.
Discord, afaik, does not even have any kind of algorithmic sorting/recommendation system to even allude to possible skewing by the developer toward a certain point of view. It’s just the other people you are hanging out with and exposed to.
echodot@feddit.uk 4 weeks ago
I’m just interested what an individual radicalised towards the left would look like. The current American administration thinks that anyone who isn’t them is radically left but what does radically been left really involve?
Kolanaki@pawb.social 4 weeks ago
They love you too much and squeeze you to death when giving hugs, like Lenny from Of Mice & Men.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
As long as it isn’t the systemic living and working condition then we can just shutdown this so-called “discord” and maybe replace it with “harmony”.
paraphrand@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Old person: “wow! And the place they do this at is called ‘Discord’?! How brazen!”
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 4 weeks ago
While I would prefer both Discord and Telegram to have alternatives, they are popular for a reason. They are in experience what the Internet was in the 00s to the people actually using it a lot.
There are bigger platforms, which drive engagement and collect data as their business model, and they are convenient for everyone making decisions, except they don’t solve any problems too well. Like a casino. It doesn’t lead to anything good, but it’s entertainment in itself.
TG and Discord are good at solving problems. They are Internet communication optimized - subscribe to a channel (or in Discord join a server, TG too has subchannels now, making a channel with subchannels similar to Discord) and say what you want to say, and read what you want to read.
Needless to say that this is pretty similar to IRC of old, and a reiteration of IRC with less load on servers, better security, structured messages, file transfers … would perhaps be nicer, but a business model should be devised for such.
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
It‘s public knowledge they use Roblox so if course they‘re using Discord too.
Nasan@sopuli.xyz 4 weeks ago
The hacker “Discord”, taking over the work of their fallen hacker ally “4chan”…
cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 4 weeks ago
the only thing discord is radicalizing people to is clerith vs cloti debates.
right wing talk radio and politicians do a heck of a lot more radicalization.
eldebryn@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
clerith vs cloti
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
- clerith - Cloud + Aerith
- cloti - Cloud + Tifa
Keep up…
N3rdBrain@lemmynsfw.com 4 weeks ago
Have you seen the russian bots on Telegram?
It’s literally everywhere.
TommySoda@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
No, they’re using the internet in general. Discord is just a platform that they can talk on and it’s fairly easy to use. It’s not like Discord advertises these servers and gets people to join them. What’s really happening is that these people are either seeking out these servers or are being sent invites from people already inside.
My point is that Discord is not the issue. If they crack down on Discord they will just find somewhere else to go. You’d have to control the entire internet in a similar way to Russia or China in order to actually stop it this way. It’s a societal issue that they are trying to solve by censorship instead of actually fixing the underlying issues that push people to extremism. I’m sure the majority of these issues would be solved by a system that actually prioritized mental health and getting people the help they need instead of one that pushes these people out of society because they are “insane.”
otacon239@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
There certainly can’t be any data to back this up… Now way making access to mental healthcare reduces fringe groups and gives them more constructive ways to deal with their emotional state. /s