New Discord community guidelines spark outrage amongst a section of users

Discord is updating its community regulations and norms to address health misinformation, inappropriate conduct, and hate speech.

The new community guidelines will go into effect on March 27, 2023, but have rubbed the user’s wrong way already.

According to reports, several Discord users are displeased with the new guidelines since they threaten substantial moderating implications for the majority of servers if they do not age-restrict their channels (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9).

As all servers are required to apply an age-restricted label if they contain a discussion of dangerous and regulated goods. This includes channels that discuss guns.

The ‘effectiveness’ and ‘durability’ of dangerous and regulated goods, as well as admitting to personal use or ownership of guns, fall under this category.

While the majority agrees that young children shouldn’t be exposed to such topics in the first place, different countries have quite different laws on firearms. What may be illegal in one country may be legal in another.

Also, this could encourage some miscreants to enter non-age-restricted servers and use these regulations against those servers to have them banned.

@discord how the heck is “admitting to personal use and/or possession of firearms” falling under “dangerous” in your updated guidelines?
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@discord your literally forcing a political opinion about gun rights in your TOS now. please allow people to decide these opinions for themselves and dont ban people for giving out their political stance on an issue such as gun rights.
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Furthermore, servers devoted to the discussion of real-world subjects such as history, video games, academics, conservation, local and international news, and others may find themselves in violation of this new laws (1,2).

Others argue that the rules are not clear and will leave many servers operating in the gray area (1,2,3).

It is challenging to set up such a guideline in a big Discord server; the only workaround is to age-restrict it, but doing so will significantly decrease the server’s user base.

Some individuals are not very concerned about these guidelines since they think they will prevent underage users from being exposed to false information and criminal activities.

From how I interpreted it and what I picked up from TnS team members commenting on it in DAC, this rule is more in relation to real life trading/buying/selling of items and less so video games, educational content, and history. Meaning that it will mainly be enforced on discussions relating to someone buying firearms (and/or) these dangerous goods in real life, and are planning to cause real-world, physical harm to individuals.
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That said, we will update this story when something new comes up so stay tuned.

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