Characterizing the Depths of the Discord Platform in Brazil

Arthur Buzelin1 * , Yan Aquino1 * , Victoria Estanislau1 * , Pedro Bento1 * , Lucas Dayrell1 *
Caio Santana1 * , Pedro Robles1 * , Ana Paula Couto1 , Virgilio Almeida1
Fabricio Benevenuto1 , Wagner Meira Jr1
1
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil
{arthurbuzelin, yanaquino, victoria.estanislau, pedro.bento, lucasdayrell, caiosantana, ana.coutosilva, virgilio, fabricio, meira}
@dcc.ufmg.br, pedroroblesduten@ufmg.br

Abstract In recent years the platform experienced a particular

Discord, a prominent social platform specialized in gaming
and voice communication, has recently attracted significant
attention in Brazilian media highlighting many instances of
toxic behavior. In order to understand this, we collected data
from 1,232 groups over an one-year period, encompassing
700 million messages. From that, we determined the main
characteristics of the network and, using a fine-tuned BERT
model, stratified the hateful messages into different types of
hate speech, in order to understand the efficiency of Discord’s
current moderation, the groups most affected by the hateful
environments, and the evolution of users engaged in the plat-
form. Our findings revealed that Discord fails to do accurate
moderation, by showing that the prevalence of hate speech
remains statistically the same between users who had their
accounts deleted or deleted them and those who remain ac-
tive. Furthermore, sexism emerges as the primary form of
hate speech in the network as a whole, with concerning age
demographics in groups with sensitive categories. Finally, we
observe that Discord’s toxic environments tend to escalate
users toxicity, highlighting the need for improved moderation
techniques.
Introduction
Originally designed as a user-friendly platform for online
gaming with real-time voice chatting capabilities, Discord
evolved into a prominent social platform serving a diverse
array of communities. Comparable to services like What-
sApp and Telegram, it is particularly known for being pop-
ular among young adolescents who utilize it as a space for
social interaction and virtual engagement.
The platform is structured into user-created and managed
groups1 , and can be public or private. Each group hosts mul-
tiple coexisting voice and text channels, supporting a variety
of communication forms including audio, images, videos,
and file sharing. This study will focus specifically on text
messages within public groups.
* These authors contributed equally.
Copyright © 2024, Association for the Advancement of Artificial
Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.
1
The groups are called ”servers” by Discord and its users, but
to avoid terminology confusion in this paper and maintain compat-
ibility to related work they’ll be referenced as ”groups”
growth, reaching more than half a billion users world wide
[Statista 2023]. This popularity increase put Discord in a
spotlight it has never been before, however, it also shed light
on worrying incidents involving the network in Brazil, lead-
ing to investigations and reports from major news vehicles in
the country. Those reports highlighted toxic behavior and il-
legal activities committed through the platform and attained
national attention and commotion. The crimes ranged from
psychological abuse, encouragement of self-harm and pe-
dophilia, mostly occurring against young women.
Other social networks had already been studied in terms
of hate speech, such as Reddit [Rieger et al. 2021], Twit-
ter [Watanabe, Bouazizi, and Ohtsuki 2018] and WhatsApp
[Saha et al. 2021], but found little to no similar work when
it came to Discord in Brazil. There were a few studies with
some kind of characterization of the platform but none tar-
geting hate speech detection, which was surprising and con-
cerning, given how popular it is today and all the problems
lying within it, as previously stated.
Aiming to fill this gap we will address and investigate the
following research questions:
RQ1: How effectively does Discord enforce user moder-
ation in accordance with its guidelines?
RQ2: What groups are targeted by hate speech and ex-
posed to toxic environments on Discord?
RQ3: How do the profiles of Discord users in Brazil
evolve over time in relation to the environment they are en-
gaged in on the platform?
We shed light on those questions by collecting data from
1,232 public groups, adding up to 700 million messages
from 2.2 million distinct users. We fine-tuned a BERT [De-
vlin et al. 2019] model designed for tweets in Portuguese
[Pérez, Giudici, and Luque 2021], using a extensive and
manually labeled collection of messages, in order to clas-
sify messages into 5 different categories of hate speech:
’Racism’, ’Homophobia’, ’Sexism’, ’Body shaming’ and
’Ideology’.
By comparing the proportion of hateful messages origi-
nating from users who were either banned or deleted their
accounts and those who remain active, we discovered that
they exhibit statistically identical rates through statistical
tests, revealing flaws in Discord moderation system. We also
typified the types of hate speech, managed to find the self-
declared age demographics and categorized the groups, al-
lowing us to uncover: (i) The age distribution within each
group category; (ii) The prevalence of each type of hate
speech across categories, revealing a general high level of
sexism and notable spikes in certain categories, such as ide-
ology related hatred in politics groups and; (iii) The con-
cerning presence of minors in sensitive groups, such as
those focused on pornography and online dating. Ultimately,
through analyzing toxicity trends over time in each environ-
ment, we concluded that users tend to increase toxicity in
environments prone to hate speech.
Background and Related Work
In this section, we begin by reviewing previous work that ex-
plored message platforms, specially Discord. Then, we ex-
amine prior research concerning social network moderation
effectiveness and hate speech classification.
Messaging Platforms
On the last few years, many mainstream platforms started to
intensify moderation in their platforms, removing misinfor-
mation and conspiracy theories that notably have promoted
violence in the real world [BBC 2020, 2021, Zadrozny and
Collins 2018, 2020].
Not surprisingly, after these content moderation interven-
tions, this kind of content migrated to digital spaces with
less moderation, like Parler [Aliapoulios et al. 2021] and
Gab [Lima et al. 2018], or messaging platforms like What-
sApp and Telegram [Hoseini et al. 2023, La Morgia et al.
2021].
Consequently, there are multiple research efforts that
report how massive misinformation campaigns explore
WhatsApp and Telegram, particularly during elections in
Brazil [Tardaguila, Benevenuto, and Ortellado 2018, Re-
sende et al. 2019, Melo et al. 2019, Júnior et al. 2022]. In
India, the spread of rumors through WhatsApp caused a se-
ries of violent lynchings around the country [Arun 2019].
Another issue regarding these platforms, in particular Tele-
gram, is that they are also commonly used for the practice of
diverse forms of digital scams [La Morgia et al. 2021].
A few previous studies have explored various uses of Dis-
cord. Research [Wiles and Simmons 2022, Lacher and Biehl
2018] investigates its application in the educational context,
while other studies focus on the platform’s use for drug traf-
ficking [van der Sanden et al. 2022]. Additionally, a compar-
ative analysis between Discord, WhatsApp, and Telegram
highlighted group characterization, post assessment, and as-
pects of privacy and security on each network [Hoseini et al.
2020]. In a different context, an investigation conducted
through one of the forums that provide links to public Dis-
cord groups [Disboard 2023] revealed the presence of a va-
riety of extremist groups [Heslep and Berge 2024]. Another
contribution was the development of a dataset of juvenile
messages classified as hateful, which can help improve hate
speech identification [Fillies, Peikert, and Paschke 2024],
while another discussed specific challenges of moderation
in voice channels [Jiang et al. 2019].
Moderation on Social Media
As a key set of analysis of our work explores moderation in
Discord, next we briefly review efforts related to moderation
in different digital platforms.
Social networks, ranging from mainstream platforms like
Facebook and the former Twitter, now known as X, to al-
ternative forums such as Gab and 4chan, have been the sub-
ject of study in academic circles due to their recognized im-
pact on people’s daily lives. These platforms are analyzed
not only to understand their overall network behavior but
also to examine the effects of digital integration. The ease
with which content can be disseminated on these networks
[Bakshy et al. 2012] often leads to the spread of hateful con-
tent and extremist beliefs and opinions. The study [Chan-
drasekharan et al. 2017] discusses the challenges in moder-
ation and the consequences that its absence causes for users.
A practical example is the case of the study [Wang et al.
2023], which identifies classes of user behaviors that pro-
mote Qanon theories and evaluates the impacts of Twitter
moderation on this content.
There are different approaches to moderating a social net-
work, which vary depending on the platform’s operation.
Moderation can be applied to individual posts, users, or even
entire groups or communities, and can be characterized as
either soft or hard interventions. Soft intervention, as ex-
plored in [Zannettou 2021], is characterized by warnings to
the user, hiding or limiting the reach of content, as well as
limiting the interactions the user can make on the platform.
As for hard intervention, exemplified in [Cheng, Danescu-
Niculescu-Mizil, and Leskovec 2016], it involves the re-
moval of content, users, or communities deemed problem-
atic from the platform [Chandrasekharan et al. 2017, Jiang
et al. 2023]. There are a few efforts that address moderation
in Reddit, in wich subreddit moderatos are volunteers who,
in addition to manually conducting interventions, can make
use of automation tools such as AutoModerator - a customiz-
able bot that assists in comment monitoring, or ModMail, a
tool that facilitates user communication with the moderator
[Dosono and Semaan 2019, Gilbert 2020, Thach et al. 0].
Hate Speech Detection
As a relevant part of work consists of measuring toxicity in
Discord messages, next, we briefly discuss efforts on mea-
suring hate speech.
There are different methods for identifying hate speech
on social media networks, as explored in previous studies
[Alkomah and Ma 2022, Saha et al. 2023, Davidson et al.
2017]. For instance, the study [Efstratiou et al. 2023] uti-
lized the Perspective API [Lees et al. 2022], to analyze in-
teractions in toxic subreddits, grouping users based on the
similarity of their behaviors. Other investigations on Reddit
focused on identifying hate speech using specialized lexi-
cons [Olteanu et al. 2018, Schmitz, Muric, and Burghardt
2022], with the former assessing user behavior during pe-
riods of extremist attacks and the latter exploring subred-
dits already known for their hate speech. Additionally, the
study [Lima et al. 2020] compared hate speech on Twitter,
a moderated platform, and Gab, an unmoderated platform,
identifying toxic expressions through a combination of pre-
selected terms and the Perspective API.
Other efforts have analyzed which groups are most tar-
geted by hate speech on social media [Chiril et al. 2021].
Also, [Silva et al. 2016] made a systematic large-scale mea-
surement study on Twitter and Whisper, providing informa-
tion on types of hate occurring on each social media and re-
lating it to structural proprieties of the network. Another re-
search [Obermaier and Schmuck 2022] investigates the rea-
sons why many teenagers and young adults frequently be-
come targets of online hate speech.
Research Gap
While platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram have have
been widely studied recently, Discord remains relatively un-
derexplored. This oversight is especially significant in the
Brazilian context, where recent incidents have caused na-
tional uproar and highlighted the platform’s role in facili-
tating harmful behaviors. Motivated by these developments,
our study seeks to address these crucial gaps by providing
a comprehensive analysis of user interactions and the effec-
tiveness of moderation within Brazilian Discord communi-
ties. By focusing on this specific geographical and cultural
setting, we aim to uncover nuanced insights that previous
studies may have overlooked, thus contributing significantly
to the broader understanding of how digital spaces can influ-
ence user behavior.
Dataset Collection
We collected messages from public Brazilian Discord
groups, following the platform policies2 , in which those
groups are split into two distinct types: (i) those featured
in Discovery 3 , an official, in app feature to browse for
new groups to join, which must adhere to stringent guide-
lines, including maintaining a safe moderated environment
and avoiding sensitive or controversial topics; (ii) and those
with publicly available invite links on external websites and
online forums.
We then developed a web scraper to collect invitation
links. This data was extracted from Discord’s discovery fea-
ture and the four most prominent Discord link-sharing web-
sites. The data collection occurred in October 2023, table
1 summarizes the number of groups identified from each
publicly available source. In this effort, we ensured that our
dataset included all publicly accessible groups in Brazil.
The collection was done using a custom crawler based
on the official Discord API 4 . Once configured, our crawler
entered public Discord groups, those in which the link invi-
tation was published on the cited public sources, and saved
any and all text messages shared on their channels from the
creation of Discord, May 13th 2015, up to October 1st 2023.
Moreover, for each message, we collected their correspond-
ing timestamp, author’s username, author’s unique ID and
content. Due to the deactivation of 77 groups, our crawler
2 groups.
https://discord.com/safety/360043709612-our-policies
3
https://discord.com/guild-discovery
4
https://discord.com/developers/applications
Source # of Links
Discovery 1,086
Disboard 1,200
Discadia 181
Top.gg 137
Discords 22
Total Unique 2,097
Table 1: Distribution of collected group links across all gath-
ered public sources.
returned approximately 3 billion text messages from 2,020
unique groups.
Although our crawling process covers a time window of
more than 8 years, we restricted our analysis to a period
in which users’ activity, in terms of exchanged messages,
reached the highest volume. The period with largest engage-
ment occurred between October 1st, 2022 and September
30th, 2023. Moreover, we filtered out messages from groups
with less than 100 exchanged messages, since those com-
prised of abandoned groups. Then, approximately 2.3 billion
messages were filtered out from the analyses.
We then proceed with our filtering process turning our
attention to the presence of bots and deleted users in our
dataset. Bots in the platform are automated accounts that
perform functions like greeting new members, moderating
content, playing multimedia files, or even hosting games
among the users. Deleted users, instead, are those in which
either an account is deleted by the user itself or by Discord
due to a violation of terms of service. We identified bots
and the ”Deleted Users” using Discord API. It was found
30,331,773 and 55,878,395 messages delivered by bots and
”Deleted Users”, respectively. The messages sent from bots
were filtered, reducing our dataset to 677,494,339 messages
sent by 2,239,337 unique users, while the ”Deleted Users”
messages were marked for future analysis. The entire pro-
cess of data filtering, including these criteria and the subse-
quent steps taken, is detailed in Figure 1.
Age retrieval
In light of reports from Brazil, where a significant number
of incidents involved teenagers both as perpetrators and vic-
tims, understanding the age demographics within our dataset
becomes crucial. This demographic insight is essential not
only for evaluating the effectiveness of Discord’s modera-
tion strategies but also for gaining a deeper understanding of
user interactions on the platform.
Given that Discord’s API doesn’t provide user’s age, we
explored a unique feature of Brazilian Discord groups: many
have an ”introduce yourself” text channel in which users typ-
ically share personal details, including their age. This study,
therefore, concentrates on leveraging this self-reported age
information, only retrieved in public channels from public
Our method involved deploying a script that utilizes reg-
ular expressions to extract age data from these channels. To
Figure 1: A diagram displaying the three stages of the dataset collection and filtering process, alongside with the total number
of groups, messages and users, after filtering.

avoid repetition, we implemented a system where only the Category # of Groups

most recent age reported by a user was retained, thus limit-
ing our dataset to one age entry per unique user ID. Chatting 406
Games 350
We considered age reports between 6 and 99 years as
Fan Club 204
plausible, based on the thought that children under six are
Anime 153
unlikely to use social media and centenarians represent a
Online Dating 111
very small proportion of the Discord user base. This age
Roleplay 106
range was selected to create a realistic and representative
Education 96
sample for our analysis.
Pornography 93
To assess its accuracy, we manually reviewed 1,000 ran-
Bussiness 80
dom messages. Our analysis revealed that 96% of these mes-
Sport 13
sages in fact represented age declarations, indicating effec-
Politics 5
tiveness in our approach.

Categories Classification Table 2: Overview of group distribution by category

To enhance our understanding of user characteristics within

different kinds of groups on Discord, and to analyze the spe-
cific ”paths” these users follow, we have categorized each
group into distinct categories. With this process, we were
able to infer with more certainty what are the communities
and the behavior expressed in Discord, which will be better
discussed later.
We initiated our analysis by classifying each group into
multiple predefined categories found on the forums and offi-
cial Discord pages. As the analysis progressed, we continu-
ally assessed the relevance and scope of these categories. For
each group, we manually assigned it to a broader, more fit-
ting category based on the groups’s description and required
tags to ensure the optimal classification.
Through this iterative process, unnecessary categories
were identified and subsequently merged into more relevant
ones. This methodical refinement continued until a total of
11 distinct categories. The final structure of these categories,
along with the total number of groups within each, is de-
tailed in Table 2.
Hate Speech Classification Model
To investigate the toxicity and presence of hate messages
in Discord groups, we required a reliable machine learning
model to detect this kind of content. In our context, we faced
two main challenges: (i) our content is written in Brazilian
Portuguese, for which several NLP machine learning models
have been proven to not have high accuracy [] and; (ii) the
intrinsic characteristics of Discord interactions and style of
writing, which may impact the accuracy of the task we are
interested in. Then, before building the detection model, we
first created an annotated corpus to be further applied to fine-
tuning our classification model.
Annotated Corpus
To conduct our labeling process, we randomly selected a set
of 16,000 Discord messages, which were divided into two
distinct subsets. The first, containing 10,000 messages, was
chosen through a weighted random selection process, which
prioritized messages from larger groups to ensure a repre-
sentative sample across different user populations. The sec-
ond subset, consisting of 6,000 messages, was built using
a term search algorithm designed to identify messages con-
taining specific terms frequently associated with toxic con-
tent. This methodological approach allowed us to balance
randomness with targeted selection to analyze message dy-
namics within the platform. This targeted selection aimed to
compile approximately 1,200 messages for each category,
deliberately including both hate speech and neutral mes-
sages to avoid term-associated bias in our dataset.
This sample of messages were divided into 8 batches
of 2,000 examples each. We recruited 8 undergraduate and
graduate students from Computer Science as annotators. We
then gave 2 batches for each, so that every message is clas-
sified twice in order to ensure the concordance among the
 Category Kappa Value
Racism 0.97
Homophobia 0.95
Sexism 0.96
Body-Shaming 0.95
Ideology 0.92

Table 3: Inter-Rater Agreement (Cohen’s Kappa)

Figure 2: Our hate speech detection model.

members. The students were instructed to label each mes-
sage with one of five available categories: Racism, Homo-
phobia, Sexism, Body-Shaming, Ideology. A message was Category Acc. Prec. Rec. F1 Score
considered toxic if it fits into at least one of these categories.
For annotation purposes, we defined each category and how Racism 0.989 0.889 0.981 0.933
to classify it in a document for all the students to follow. Homophobia 0.985 0.924 0.930 0.927
We applied the Cohen’s Kappa statistic [Cohen 1960], to Sexism 0.987 0.940 0.886 0.913
measure inter-rater agreement. The kappa values are shown Body-Shaming 0.985 0.887 0.993 0.937
in Table 3. These values demonstrate a substantial level of Ideology 0.993 0.948 0.958 0.953
agreement among the raters, reinforcing the validity of our
classification terms and the effectiveness of our guidelines. Table 4: BERT metrics for prediction of each class validated
on our test set
Classification Model
To perform a robust analysis of toxicity and hate messages
on the Discord network on a large scale, we developed a fine- teristics inherent in our data.
tuned version of a pre-trained BERT model [Devlin et al. For training our model, we randomly divided the dataset
2019]. BERT, an encoder-only transformer model for NLP, into three non-overlapping sets: training, validation, and test
typically undergoes extensive self-supervised pre-training, sets, comprising 81%, 9%, and 10% of the labeled dataset,
engaging in tasks such as masked word prediction across respectively.The fine-tuning was executed using the PyTorch
large text corpora. This pre-training process lays a solid library [Paszke et al. 2019], with the AdamW optimizer
foundation of linguistic knowledge, which can be refined for [Loshchilov and Hutter 2017] on the training set, with a de-
specific tasks through the fine-tuning process. fined learning rate at 5 × 10−6 . The models was trained
Our decision to train a custom model was driven by ini- on one GPU NVIDIA RTX 4090. An early stopping ap-
tial tests that demonstrated off-the-shelf solutions like Per- proach was employed based on the validation set. Further-
spective API and PySentimiento [Pérez, Giudici, and Luque more, classification thresholds were established based on the
2021] underperforming on our dataset. With a finely la- output probabilities of the model, defined as the thresholds
beled dataset and additional fine-tuning, we aimed to de- for each class that yielded the best F1-score on our valida-
velop a model that is specifically tailored to the unique con- tion set.
text of Discord and the specific types of messages that are Our classifier, designed for detecting Portuguese hate
prevalent on this platform, since known solutions, such as speech, demonstrated highly reliable prediction metrics on
base BERT, only generalize across similar datasets [Fortuna, the test set, as detailed in Table 4. These results showcase
Soler-Company, and Wanner 2021]. the model’s capability to accurately identify hate speech
The initial training of the hate speech model from Py- within Brazilian Discord communities and discern subtle
Sentimiento was conducted starting with the BERTaba- variations in language. This performance ensures that our
poru weights [da Costa et al. 2023], derived from a self- findings are robust and can significantly contribute to more
supervised pre-training on 238 million tweets in Portuguese. effective moderation strategies, potential policy implemen-
The model was fine-tuned by the PySentimiento authors for tations, and the broader discourse on maintaining commu-
the multi-class hate speech classification task using 6000 nity health on social platforms.
tweets in Portuguese. For the construction of our clas- Our model serves as a foundational step towards under-
sifier, we leveraged the weights provided by the PySen- standing the scale of hate speech on the platform and paves
timiento framework , which includes a BERT model specifi- the way for future studies to explore the implications of
cally trained for hate speech detection across five categories: these findings in broader social, psychological, and regula-
racism, homophobia, body shaming, ideology, and sexism. tory contexts.
In our research, we conducted further fine-tuning of
the PySentimento hate speech model following the same
classes, but trained on our discord messages labeled dataset. Results
This procedure refined the model to better suit our specific
classification needs, allowing us to capture nuanced charac- This section presents our results and their findings.
Figure 3: Confidence interval plot of hate speech between
Deleted and non Deleted users.
User Moderation
Discord’s Terms of Service claim the use of multiple mod-
eration tools, including machine learning technologies for
identifying malicious content, complemented by human-led
investigations. Despite these measures, our study shows that
there are concerns about the sufficiency of this moderation.
The platform’s terms of service states that they have the
right, but not the obligation, to review such reports and block
or remove content[Discord 2023b], placing heavy reliance
on the active and responsible participation of the administra-
tors. Ineffective group management can lead to unmoderated
spaces, resulting in toxic environments.
This section explores the correlation between hate speech
incidents among active users and those who have been
deleted. The purpose of this analysis is to determine if there
are notable differences in the reasons for account deletions.
We hypothesize that the absence of statistically significant
disparities would indicate one of two scenarios: (i) Most
users delete their own account, rather than being banned by
Discord’s administrative actions; (ii) If the platform indeed
bans the users, it is not for hate speech related reasons.
Figure 3 shows confidence intervals for the percentage
of hate speech in all messages across the groups, as well
as those originating specifically from users whose accounts
were subsequently deleted. Our analysis substantiates the
initial hypothesis: the observed results are remarkably con-
sistent with expected trends. Despite some variances, none
are considerable enough to indicate effective moderation by
the platform, since all the intervals intersect. This assertion
is supported by the confidence intervals outlined previously;
the percentages of hate speech from deleted users fall within
the 90% expected range.
This analysis employed Bootstrap tests, utilizing 100,000
random subsets, which is about 100 times the amount of
groups, to estimate the group metrics based on a weighted
mean that reflects the size of each group. This approach aims
to mimic real-world conditions and mitigate any potential bi-
ases, thereby providing a reliable estimate of expected out-
comes.
Discord claims to have an automated system for user dele-
tion based on their reports [Discord 2023a]. However, our
findings indicate no substantial difference between the cat-
egories, calling into question the effectiveness of the said
Figure 4: Age distribution histogram across all groups.
AI moderation. This is particularly concerning given that
2.5% of the messages in our dataset contain hate speech.
This rate is alarming, especially in Brazil, where racism and
homophobia are considered criminal offenses punishable by
imprisonment, according to Brazilian Constitution [Brasil
1989].
These findings are further corroborated by a survey that
was conducted [Discord 2024], which reveals that during the
fourth quarter of 2023, only 3,313 accounts globally were
banned for hateful conduct out of more than 200,000 to-
tal bans. This discrepancy highlights a significant oversight
in Discord’s moderation practices, particularly considering
that within our dataset alone—focusing on Brazilian Dis-
cord—approximately 16 million messages were identified
as hateful. This vast number of unchecked hateful messages
could potentially contribute significantly to the types of se-
vere incidents reported.
Age Demographics and Implications
Understanding the age demographics of its users is pivotal,
particularly in light of Brazilian media reports frequently fo-
cusing on issues affecting teenagers and children in this plat-
form. However, Discord does not directly provide users’ age
data, presenting a challenge for accurate demographic anal-
ysis.
The age distribution of Discord users is illustrated in Fig-
ures 2 and 3. In Figure 2, ages are categorized into six-year
intervals. To provide a clearer view of the younger demo-
graphics, Figure 3 specifically focuses on users up to the age
of 23, highlighting the predominant age group on this social
media platform.
It is evident that a majority of Discord’s user base is un-
derage. Notably, thousands of users are below the age of
thirteen. This observation is concerning not only because it
suggests a large presence of young individuals on the plat-
form, but also because it implies that many users falsify their
age upon registration, contravening platform’s Terms of Use,
which prohibits account creation for individuals under thir-
teen years of age.
The graphs also shed light on a possible reason why Dis-
cord has been overlooked in research and remains relatively

Figure 5: Age distribution histogram across all groups be-
tween 7 to 23 years.
obscure to many. The number of users declines sharply after
the age of 20, indicating that adults are generally less aware
of the activities and dynamics within the platform. This sit-
uation allows younger users to engage more freely, often
without adequate moderation. This raises further concerns,
especially considering that Discord largely relies on user-on-
user moderation, which might mean that young users could
be moderating their peers, an arrangement that poses several
ethical questions.
To illustrate the dimension of our hypotheses we con-
ducted a experiment prior to the analysis to assess how eas-
ily underage users could engage with sensitive content. It
aimed to provide indicative evidence rather than definitive
proof. This segment of our study did not involve direct in-
teraction with groups or users, but rather focused on obser-
vational data that was already collected on normal circum-
stances via API.
Drawing upon our prior understanding of groups related
to adult content such as those categorized as online dating
or pornography, we randomly selected 100 groups from this
pool. Then, we created accounts with the minimum age al-
lowed by the platform, 13 years old.
Then proceeded to examine three critical aspects:
1. Whether we were able to enter these groups.
2. Access to and visibility of +18 text channels upon enter-
ing a group.
3. Access to and availability of +18 voice channels upon
entering a group.
Out of the 100 randomly selected groups, 71 allowed en-
try. Among these accessible groups, 53 permitted access to
+18 text channels, while 68 allowed access to +18 voice
channels.
This observation raises significant concerns, as it indi-
cates that underage users can potentially engage in voice
calls with older individuals within groups that were designed
for adults. Discord appears to lack adequate censorship mea-
sures to address this issue leading to serious child exposure.
Hate Speech Category Amount of Messages
Sexism 0.81%
Homophobia 0.44%
Ideology 0.58%
Body 0.38%
Racism 0.30%
Table 5: Percentage of total messages belonging to hate
speech categories
Figure 6: Violin plot of user’s age in group categories.
Category Analysis
As highlighted in the recent news reports in Brazil, it was ex-
plicitly pointed out the prevalent sexism within the Brazilian
community, treating it as a disturbingly normalized issue. To
quantitatively assess this scenario, we utilized our classifier
to analyze all messages in our dataset. The results, depicted
in Table 5, illustrates the most common forms of toxicity
identified in our analysis.
Building on the alarming findings of the report, the quan-
titative data illustrates the gravity of sexism as the most
prevalent form of toxicity on Discord within the Brazilian
community. With instances, sexism significantly surpasses
other types of toxic behaviors, as seen in Table 5.
The high incidence of other forms of toxicity such as ho-
mophobia, racism, attacks based on body image and ideol-
ogy indicates a broader issue of aggressive and exclusion-
ary behavior in online interactions. This issue is particularly
alarming considering that 8 out of the 12 identified clusters
primarily consist of users under the age of 18, notably in-
cluding those involved in pornography and online dating, as
seen in Figure 6. Furthermore, the four clusters with an av-
erage member age over 18 comprise only 4.59% of the total
user base.
Categorizing groups reveals distinct patterns of hate
speech prevalence, with ’Pornography’ category exhibiting
the highest occurrences of sexism, while ’Politics’ is intu-
itively characterized by high ideology related toxicity, as
seen in Figure 7.
It is noteworthy that the ’games’ category, which repre-
sents Discord’s original purpose, exhibits a relatively low
incidence of hate speech. This observation emphasizes the
 Figure 7: Heatmap of toxicity in group categories.
fact that many of the platform’s most significant issues man-
ifest in less visible or non-gaming contexts. Therefore, an
analysis that focuses on Discord as merely a gaming net-
work might fail to capture these broader, more pervasive
problems.
We also could correlate users age and which types of hate
they’re most into, either reproducing or being exposed to
it. As shown in Figure 6 and Figure 7, ’Pornography’, the
category that had the most pronounced hate speech occur-
rences, has a concerning high incidence of younger audi-
ences. This analysis underscores the critical importance of
addressing safety concerns on platforms where children and
teenagers are engaging with content and communities meant
for adults. It also highlights a potential gap in parental over-
sight and the platform’s responsibility to protect younger
users from exposure to harmful content.
User Path
Users may enter in various groups and interact with many
other users. To effectively monitor user behavior, it is es-
sential to first comprehend the different environments that
they could encounter. While it is challenging to pinpoint the
exact triggers of toxic messages, analyzing patterns can pro-
vide valuable insights.
We conducted a detailed examination of user behavior in
discrete intervals. Messages from each user were divided
into five equal segments, with each segment representing
one-fifth of their total messages. This segmentation allows
us to track the evolution of discourse across different peri-
ods for users who have posted at least one toxic message.
After evaluating all segments for a user, the patterns of be-
havior were analyzed to determine the trend: (i) If the toxic-
ity rate of messages increased in each segment, the user was
categorized under ’Increasing Toxicity’; (ii) Conversely, if
the trend showed a decrease in toxicity over time, the user
fell into the ’Decreasing Toxicity’ category; (iii) If no clear
trend was observed and the user’s behavior varied between
the segments, they were placed in the ’Inconsistent Toxicity’
category.
Based on the results shown in Figure 8, the majority of
users fall under the ’inconsistent’ category, suggesting a spo-
radic presence of toxic behavior that does not follow a clear
increasing or decreasing trend. This irregularity could in-
dicate that users’ behavior may be context-dependent, in-
Figure 8: Trends in users toxicity.
fluenced by external factors, or that Discord experiences a
highly dynamic discourse environment where users oscillate
between toxic and non-toxic interactions over time. Despite
that, there is a relatively high number of users exhibiting an
increase in toxic behavior. The disparity between this group
and those that exhibit decreasing toxicity behaviors high-
lights a potential escalation in negative discourse within the
platform.
By analyzing Figures 7 and 9, we observe a dis-
cernible pattern of user migration among the ”pornography,”
”anime,” and ” online dating” clusters. This trend is partic-
ularly troubling as it suggests a trajectory within these com-
munities that may influence user behavior. The interconnect-
edness shown in the network graph, along with the heatmap
data, highlights significant movements between these clus-
ters, indicating that user behavior is not confined to isolated
groups but spans across multiple, potentially influencing and
reinforcing harmful ideologies and behaviors.
To explore the impact of toxic messages on user behavior
within Brazilian Discord communities, an analysis was con-
ducted using a novel graphical representation. This graph,
illustrated in Figure 10, tracks the time interval between an
initial toxic message and subsequent toxic responses. The
graph demonstrates a striking pattern: about 60% of follow-
up toxic messages occur within one minute of the initial
message. This visual insight highlights the rapid propaga-
tion of toxicity within the digital communication channels,
suggesting a potent, immediate influence exerted by the ini-
tial toxic message on subsequent interactions.
Studies of similar interactions on platforms like Twit-
ter and Facebook have shown that toxic messages tend to
provoke immediate follow-up responses, indicating a reac-
tive and contagious nature of toxicity [Saveski, Roy, and
Roy 2021]. This phenomenon, also evident in the Discord
groups, suggests that once a toxic message is introduced into
a conversation, it significantly increases the likelihood of an
immediate toxic response.

Figure 9: Weighted directed graph of user migration between
group clusters. The arrow thickness and direction represent
the amount of flow going from one cluster to another.
Conclusion
This study has critically evaluated the transformation of Dis-
cord from a platform originally designed for gamers into
a network that fails to accurately prevent hate speech and
toxic behaviors in Brazilian online communities. Through
the analysis of over 700 million messages from 1,232 public
groups, we addressed several pivotal research questions:
RQ1: Effectiveness of Discord’s Moderation.
The findings reveal that Discord’s current moderation
tools and community-led governance structures are insuffi-
cient for Brazilian groups. Despite the platform’s attempts
to deploy advanced moderation technologies and commu-
nity guidelines, the enforcement remains inconsistent, often
being unable to contain the proliferation of harmful behav-
iors.
RQ2: Prevalence and Targets of Hate Speech.
Our analysis pointed sexism as the main form of hate
speech and indicated that certain groups, particularly those
related to politics, and adult content, are hotspots for toxic
interactions. The persistence of harmful content in these
groups emphasize the need for targeted moderation strate-
gies that are sensitive to the category and the age demo-
graphics of each group.
RQ3: User Profile Evolution in Relation to Toxic Envi-
ronments.
Analysis of users’ behavior exhibited how they move
across different categories of groups, revealing worrying mi-
gration patterns. We also could infer how toxic messages can
instigate more toxicity, specially in an unmoderated environ-
ment, pointed out by the trends and interval between hateful
messages.
Implications and Recommendations The urgent need for
enhanced moderation strategies is evident. Discord must
Figure 10: Time interval of next hate speech message, after
one occurs
adopt more sophisticated, real-time automated tools to de-
tect and prevent hate speech and other harmful content more
effectively, specially for underage users. Moreover, there is a
critical need for rigorous enforcement of community guide-
lines and a reevaluation of the reliance on community mod-
erators as the front line defense against ascending toxicity.
Future research Directions Further research should ex-
plore the development of context-aware moderation tech-
nologies that can dynamically adapt to the complexities of
language, culture, and interaction patterns unique to Brazil-
ian Discord communities. Additionally, longitudinal studies
could investigate the long-term impacts of exposure to toxic
environments on user behavior, contributing to more effec-
tive digital citizenship and online community management
strategies.
Our study contributes to the broader discourse on the re-
sponsibilities of social media platforms in regulating con-
tent and behavior, highlighting specific challenges and op-
portunities within the Brazilian context. This research not
only deepens our understanding of digital communication
dynamics on the platform but also provides a foundation for
future interventions to foster healthier online communities.
Acknowledgments
The research leading to these results has been funded by
CNPQ, CAPES and FAPEMIG.
Ethical Statement
The data in this paper is derived from Discord API. It con-
tains data from public groups and channels. No user/group
identifier is published within this paper.
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 Paper Checklist
1. For most authors...
(a) Would answering this research question advance sci-
ence without violating social contracts, such as violat-
ing privacy norms, perpetuating unfair profiling, exac-
erbating the socio-economic divide, or implying disre-
spect to societies or cultures? Yes
(b) Do your main claims in the abstract and introduction
accurately reflect the paper’s contributions and scope?
Yes
(c) Do you clarify how the proposed methodological ap-
proach is appropriate for the claims made? Yes
(d) Do you clarify what are possible artifacts in the data
used, given population-specific distributions? NA
(e) Did you describe the limitations of your work? Yes
(f) Did you discuss any potential negative societal im-
pacts of your work? NA
(g) Did you discuss any potential misuse of your work?
NA
(h) Did you describe steps taken to prevent or mitigate po-
tential negative outcomes of the research, such as data
and model documentation, data anonymization, re-
sponsible release, access control, and the reproducibil-
ity of findings? Yes
(i) Have you read the ethics review guidelines and en-
sured that your paper conforms to them? Yes
2. Additionally, if your study involves hypotheses testing...
(a) Did you clearly state the assumptions underlying all
theoretical results? Yes
(b) Have you provided justifications for all theoretical re-
sults? Yes
(c) Did you discuss competing hypotheses or theories that
might challenge or complement your theoretical re-
sults? Yes
(d) Have you considered alternative mechanisms or expla-
nations that might account for the same outcomes ob-
served in your study? Yes
(e) Did you address potential biases or limitations in your
theoretical framework? Yes
(f) Have you related your theoretical results to the existing
literature in social science? Yes
(g) Did you discuss the implications of your theoretical
results for policy, practice, or further research in the
social science domain? Yes
3. Additionally, if you are including theoretical proofs...
(a) Did you state the full set of assumptions of all theoret-
ical results? NA
(b) Did you include complete proofs of all theoretical re-
sults? NA
4. Additionally, if you ran machine learning experiments...
(a) Did you include the code, data, and instructions
needed to reproduce the main experimental results (ei-
ther in the supplemental material or as a URL)? No,
because we are unsure about releasing data from the
Discord API since it could contain data that harms the
moral integrity of various groups and society in gen-
eral.
(b) Did you specify all the training details (e.g., data splits,
hyperparameters, how they were chosen)? Yes, see
”Hate Speech Classification Model” section
(c) Did you report error bars (e.g., with respect to the ran-
dom seed after running experiments multiple times)?
NA
(d) Did you include the total amount of compute and the
type of resources used (e.g., type of GPUs, internal
cluster, or cloud provider)? Yes
(e) Do you justify how the proposed evaluation is suffi-
cient and appropriate to the claims made? Yes
(f) Do you discuss what is “the cost“ of misclassification
and fault (in)tolerance? Yes
5. Additionally, if you are using existing assets (e.g., code,
data, models) or curating/releasing new assets, without
compromising anonymity...
(a) If your work uses existing assets, did you cite the cre-
ators? Yes, all the methods used were correctly refer-
enced in the paper
(b) Did you mention the license of the assets? NA
(c) Did you include any new assets in the supplemental
material or as a URL? NA
(d) Did you discuss whether and how consent was ob-
tained from people whose data you’re using/curating?
NA
(e) Did you discuss whether the data you are using/cu-
rating contains personally identifiable information or
offensive content? Yes, see Ethical Statement
(f) If you are curating or releasing new datasets, did you
discuss how you intend to make your datasets FAIR?
NA
(g) If you are curating or releasing new datasets, did you
create a Datasheet for the Dataset? NA
6. Additionally, if you used crowdsourcing or conducted
research with human subjects, without compromising
anonymity...
(a) Did you include the full text of instructions given to
participants and screenshots? NA
(b) Did you describe any potential participant risks, with
mentions of Institutional Review Board (IRB) ap-
provals? NA
(c) Did you include the estimated hourly wage paid to
participants and the total amount spent on participant
compensation? NA
(d) Did you discuss how data is stored, shared, and dei-
dentified? NA