According to Bloomberg, the gunman behind Saturday’s attack in Buffalo, N.Y., killed 10 people and injured three others, and the gunman behind the attack allegedly used Discord to discuss and share plans before the attack.
Back in December, the suspect reportedly used a private server on the popular chat service to describe his intent to carry out the attack. He later shared a link to a Discord log describing his attack plan and white supremacist views, according to Bloomberg.
The suspect mentioned more than 30 times in the app the terrorists who attacked the Christchurch mosque in New Zealand, using racist slogans and extremist language, the report said.
A Discord spokesperson told Bloomberg: “As soon as we became aware of it, we acted on it and removed the server in accordance with our policy against violent extremism.” The company did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for more information about its control policies. ask.
In 2021, the company wrote that Discord’s management team “divisions and cooperates” between responding to user-reported information and “proactively discovering and removing” servers and users engaged in “highly compromised activities.” The management method was created after Discord learned that white supremacists used its app to organize a violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
“Since 2017, the T&S team has spent a lot of time trying to ensure that another incident like Charlottesville is not planned on our platform,” the company wrote last year.
In 2019, Discord relied primarily on user reports to moderate its platform and did not actively monitor private or public servers, according to PC Gamer that year. The company’s regulatory team does have the ability to read information from private servers, but Discord typically only does so when users report information, the report said.
Buffalo police said Saturday’s attack is being investigated as a hate crime. CNN reported that the suspect, identified as Payton S. Gendron, told authorities that he targeted the black community; 11 of those shot were black.
The suspects also allegedly used a Discord scheme to live-stream the attack. Video of the attack was streamed live on Twitch, which claims it stopped streaming “less than two minutes after the violence began.” Even so, some videos are still circulating online as major platforms struggle to crack down on newly uploaded horror footage.