Discord has expanded its Hateful Conduct Policy to explicitly include prohibitions against misgendering and deadnaming in a policy update. Accompanying this policy update, Discord has also implemented a comprehensive warning system to enforce these guidelines effectively.
Discord never had freedom of speech to begin with, but isn’t this extreme? People should be able to say what they want privately in their own servers. Brigading and harassment in DMs is already banned.
You do not have a right to free speech on the property of a private business. A restaurant can kick you out for being an asshole. A tech company can kick you off their servers for being an asshole.
Private servers are moderated all the time. Just look at the piracy prevention that goes on.
It only seems that way because their enforcement is so poor, I’m kind of wondering myself if this is going to change anything or if they’re not enforcing anything and just putting this up as a front it doesn’t mean a whole lot.
Discord does not use e2e encryption meaning they can do whatever they want with the content you share not only with your friends but with the company. They can use the guise of safety (eg we found a private server planning terrorism) to extend this access to everything. Since the company can read everything on the platform, they’re carrying a serious set of risks and liability with all of that potentially bad or illegal content. By creating policies like this, they can sidestep litigation (to an extent) when bad content is found by pointing to policies and handwavy enforcement. It might not be illegal to deadname (at least in the US); that does not stop civil litigation.
Given that fuck all is going to change, I view this primarily as a risk reduction strategy that most people will misconstrue as social good. That’s a really cynical take. I’m pretty cynical about the motives of massive orgs beyond risk management.