Discord gained popularity with the alt-right due to the client’s supporting anonymity and privacy. Analyst Keegan Hankes from the Southern Poverty Law Center said “It’s pretty unavoidable to be a leader in this [alt-right] movement without participating in Discord”.

In early 2017, CEO Jason Citron stated Discord was aware of these groups and their servers.Citron stated that servers found to be engaged in illegal activities or violations of the terms of service would be shut down, but would not disclose any examples.

Following the violent events that occurred during the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017, it was found that Discord had been used to plan and organize the white nationalist rally. This included participation by Richard Spencer and Andrew Anglin, high-level figures in the movement.

Discord responded by closing servers that supported the alt-right and far-right, and banning users who had participated. Discord’s executives condemned “white supremacy” and “neo-Nazism”, and said that these groups “are not welcome on Discord”.

Discord has worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center to identify hateful groups using Discord and ban those groups from the service. Since then, several neo-Nazi and alt-right servers have been shut down by Discord, including those operated by neo-Nazi terrorist group Atomwaffen Division, Nordic Resistance Movement, Iron March, and European Domas.

In January 2018, The Daily Beast reported that it found several Discord servers that were specifically engaged in distributing revenge porn and facilitating real-world harassment of the victims of these images and videos.

Such actions are against Discord’s terms of service and Discord has shut down servers and banned users identified from these servers, but the ease of creating new accounts and servers allows such servers to continue to proliferate.

In July 2018, Discord updated its terms of service to ban drawn pornography with underaged subjects. A social media movement subsequently criticized Discord for selectively allowing “cub” content, or underaged pornographic furry artwork, under the same guidelines.

Discord moderators held that “cub porn” was separate from lolicon and shotacon, being “allowable as long as it is tagged properly.” After numerous complaints from the community, Discord amended its community guidelines in February 2019 to include “non-humanoid animals and mythological creatures as long as they appear to be underage” in its list of disallowed categories, in addition to announcing periodic transparency reports to better communicate with users.

In March 2019, the media collective Unicorn Riot published the contents of a Discord server used by several members of the white nationalist group Identity Evropa who were also members of the United States Armed Forces. (concern- wikipedia)