In the wake of growing concerns over child exploitation on the popular gaming chat platform Discord, CEO Jason Citron has voiced his alarm and commitment to tackling the issue. Discord has long been recognized as a troubling vector for groomers and sexual deviants to reach children and teens.
NBC News report that the CEO of popular gaming chat platform Discord, Jason Citron, has expressed his anxiety and commitment to addressing the issue of child exploitation and grooming in the wake of mounting concerns about child abuse on the site.
Speaking at a recent tech gathering in San Francisco, Citron stated that reports of child exploitation on the platform are “horrifying” and that Discord took the issue “very seriously.” Citron stated: “As a parent, it’s horrifying… We take this stuff very seriously.”
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Since its inception in 2015, Discord has been linked to several incidences of child exploitation. Discord communications have been implicated in at least 35 child abduction, grooming, or exploitation cases and 165 child sexual abuse material prosecutions.
Citron emphasized the work of the company’s committed child safety team, which works relentlessly to prevent exploitation on the site “in a way that respects the privacy of all the people who are not doing these things.”
The platform’s current moderation strategy, which mostly depends on community self-regulation, has come under scrutiny. Discord does utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to scan uploaded photos and videos and compare them to a database of content known to contain child sex abuse. Beyond this, though, communities are largely responsible for moderating.
According to Citron, AI might be a crucial tool for combating child exploitation on the network. “One of the challenges I think that all of the folks in our industry have is that we have so many things happening at scale on the platform and it’s so hard to sort of identify things,” he said.
However, there are some who object to the employment of AI in this situation. There are worries that AI may make child safety problems worse. The FBI has just issued a warning about adults utilizing AI to create modified photographs of kids in order to engage in sextortion, a kind of blackmail that involves demanding money or sexual content.
Read more at NBC News here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan