9621 Agnes Crossing, Lake Suzanneview, New Mexico Island 84604-9295.
In early October, Discord messenger, created for chat purposes for gamers, was blocked in Russia. Roskomnadzor blocked this with five decisions that allegedly violated Russian legislation. But blocking
In early October, Discord messenger, created for chat purposes for gamers, was blocked in Russia. Roskomnadzor blocked this with five decisions that allegedly violated Russian legislation. But blocking the messenger creates inconvenience even for the Russian invaders who use it. Discord has a total audience of 40 million in Russia and 200 million worldwide. Messengers are also used in the Ukrainian army.
Shortly after Russia’s decision, the reporter was also blocked by Türkiye due to the administration’s refusal to share information with the country’s authorities.
What is Discord, why is it important in the Russia-Ukraine war and how Russia blocked it – read in the article 24 Channels.
The blocking of Discord, which is expected to happen in the near future, was reported by the Russian publication “Kommersant” at the end of September, citing a knowledgeable source. The reason for the blocking of the media was given by 5 decisions on violations of Russian legislation – their editors found it in the list of banned sites of Roskomnadzor. The possibility of blocking has also been confirmed in the gaming industry.
Discord is a development of the American company Discord Inc., which was first released in 2015. The company’s founders include current general manager Jason Citron and Kharkiv-born programmer and technical director Stanislav Vishnevskyi.
Messenger allows you to communicate through voice calls, including group chats, video chats, messages, media and file transfers. These features are the reason why Discord has become popular among gamers. In Messenger, you can combine users into communities with a server name. Access to them is by invitation.
Discord gained wide popularity in 2020, when the company began to position itself as a universal communication platform. It helped attract $100 million in investment to develop the platform.
Additionally, Discord has long been known as an island of “free thought” on the Internet, occupying the space occupied by Telegram until recently. Messenger’s content is virtually unregulated, and only in recent years has the program’s management begun to combat the spread of neo-Nazi, racist and anti-Semitic communities.
As of March 2024, Discord was the 30th most visited site in the world, with 22.98% of its traffic coming from the United States. The number of active users is over 200 million.
There were numerous failures before blocking. These include August, which also affects Telegram, WhatsApp, VKontakte and the popular gaming store Steam. Although Roskomnadzor claimed that this was due to an attack on Russian telecom operators, local experts expressed the opinion that this was a failed attempt to block Telegram or preparation for it.
Already on September 18, Discord stopped working in some regions of Russia. Reconnecting via a VPN service sometimes helped. At the same time, the messenger was not a global failure. Discord crashed again on September 26.
However, Discord was finally blocked in October. On October 8, the Roskomsvoboda project announced that the failure in Discord was related to the actions of Russian authorities. Later, the blocking of the messenger was confirmed by Roskomnadzor.
The regulator claims that the messenger’s administration violated the requirements of Russian legislation and did not remove “illegal materials”. The editor sent a request to Discord administration to remove 947 such materials. From now on, Discord is blocked in Russia “to prevent the use of the messenger for terrorist and extremist purposes, the recruitment of citizens to carry them out, the sale of drugs in connection with the publication of illegal information.”
Authorities called on Discord to remove illegal content, but the response was inaction, leading to the ban.
– Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Information Policy Committee Anton Gorelkin told the TARS propaganda agency.
After the messenger was blocked, Russian “militants” and invaders began to complain about the inability to monitor broadcasts from UAVs at the headquarters and the lack of a Russian alternative. Occupiers collectively complain that this makes it difficult to carry out combat missions. Some channels even blamed the Ukrainians.
Screenshots from Telegram
It is interesting that Discord is also used on the Ukrainian side – commanders use a messenger for players to manage troops. Allows military personnel to quickly join group voice calls. Discord was specifically used for communication in 2023 during exercises involving the Ground Defense Forces and the 26th Riverboat Division.
Last year, Discord was “lit up” by a photo of a Ukrainian command post published by The New York Times.
Disagreement at Ukrainian command post / Photo: Carlotta Gall, The New York Times
Interesting! In the spring of 2023, Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old soldier serving in the reconnaissance wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, leaked a series of documents via Discord that allegedly contained information about a Ukrainian counterattack.
Teixeira was later arrested and named as the leader of a small online gaming group that leaked classified US intelligence documents.
Even though Türkiye is a member of NATO and supports Ukraine, it sometimes resorts to very Russian practices. It’s like the blocking of Instagram or Discord that happened after Russia.
On October 9, Türkiye blocked access to Discord due to a court order. The reason is that the platform refuses to share the information requested by Ankara. Turkish Information Technologies and Communications Authority published the decision to ban access to its website.
Minister of Justice Yılmaz Tunç said that the Ankara court decided to block access to Discord from Turkey due to the suspicion that users committed “sexual abuse and obscenity against children” crimes.
The curfew came at a time when the public reacted greatly to the murder of two women by a 19-year-old man in Istanbul in October. The assassination was widely discussed and applauded by Discord users.
According to Reuters, Minister of Transport and Infrastructure Abdulkadir Uraloğlu also said that Discord’s operating principles make it difficult for authorities to monitor and control.
Security personnel cannot view the content. We can only intervene when users complain to us about the content shared there. We had to block access because Discord refused to share its own information, including IP addresses and content, with our security departments.
– he told journalists in parliament.
Time will tell whether Discord will open in Turkey as quickly as Instagram in a few days. After all, as the experience of “blocking” the telegraph in Russia shows, the decisions of officials in authoritarian countries can be reviewed without public discussion and clear explanation. At the same time, the story of Pavel Durov’s arrest in France brings to the fore the question of whether even in a democratic world there is a place for platforms where there is no moderation, where and how everything can be distributed.
Source: 24 Tv
John Wilkes is a seasoned journalist and author at Div Bracket. He specializes in covering trending news across a wide range of topics, from politics to entertainment and everything in between.
