At a time when other social media platforms are increasingly unsafe for LGBTQ+ people, Discord has banned misgendering and deadnaming trans people as part of an update to its Hateful Conduct Policy.
Discord, a social media and messaging app that’s especially popular with gamers, updated its internal hate speech policy in April 2022 and only recently went public with these changes “as part of a regular review to improve transparency,” as a representative for the company told the Advocate. The hate speech policy now prohibits “repeatedly using slurs to degrade and demean individuals or groups,” which “includes deadnaming or misgendering a transgender person,” according to the platform’s website.
Discord also outlined the consequences of violating the Hateful Conduct Policy in an explanation of its Warning System, which has been introduced to aid enforcement of the policy. When a user is reported for breaking the rules, they will receive a direct message from Discord letting them know about the violation. Discord’s actual actions in response to an infraction depend on “the severity of the harm, the type of user content (i.e. text, image, behavior), and the user’s history of past violations,” the guide explains.
“If the violation was not particularly severe, they may lose these features for a few hours,” the guide reads. “If it was a repeated violation or higher severity violation, they may lose some features for a few days or up to one year.”
A spokesperson for Discord told the Advocate that “As part of our ongoing efforts to ensure Discord remains a safe and fun place for people to hang out with friends, we continually evaluate potential harms and update our policies.”
“We often work with organizations and subject matter experts to ensure our policies accurately encompass a holistic view of how these issues manifest across the internet and society,” the spokesperson said. They did not specify whether they worked directly with any organizations in updating these guidelines.
Regardless, the advocacy group GLAAD, which annually evaluates LGBTQ+-related policies of major social media platforms, applauded Discord’s move. “Alongside inflammatory mischaracterizations of transgender healthcare and baseless assertions of trans and LGBTQ+ people being threats to children, the practice of targeted misgendering and deadnaming has emerged in recent years as one of the most common modalities for expressing contempt and hate toward trans and nonbinary people across all social media platforms,” the group wrote in a statement.
GLAAD’s 2023 Social Media Safety Index, which rates major social media platforms (X, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, and TikTok) based on their LGBTQ+ policies, found that while most platforms had improved upon their policies from previous years, there was still much room for improvement. Instagram scored the highest among the apps at 63%. X, formerly known as Twitter, was the only platform whose score declined. While X previously had a ban on misgendering and deadnaming, it rolled back that ban in April. In June, X CEO Elon Musk, who has repeatedly engaged with anti-trans posts, declared that the platform would consider “cis” a slur.
Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for Them’s weekly newsletter here.