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Extremists are using Discord to radicalize American youth, officials warned this year (www.nbcnews.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 42 points 1 year ago (1 child)

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.

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  • [–] 23 points 1 year 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 facing.

    ...Another, I guess, is political discourse.

    In other words, Discord the company is having their cake and eating it; pretending they're an innocent 'between friends' private chat platform while absolutely structuring it to encourage scams, mega communities with notification spam, patreon-like benefit tiers, and weird stuff that absolutely seeds recruitment for, and engagement on, extremist channels.

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