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What is Discord, the social app where Pentagon documents were found?

    Discord, the eight-year-old social media and messaging platform popular among youth and video game players that has increasingly become a mainstream part of the internet, has once again drawn controversy.

    Leaked Pentagon documents allegedly circulated on the platform as early as March before appearing on other sites. The leaks are the latest incident in recent years in which Discord has played a key role.

    Discord was introduced in 2015 by Jason Citron, a video game player and computer programmer. Mr. Citron’s game development studio was struggling to gain traction, so he created a chat application that people could use to communicate with each other while playing games.

    The platform was a niche product until the pandemic, when young people were looking for ways to chat with their friends and join online communities. By the end of 2021, it had more than 150 million active users each month, up from 56 million in 2019. It was recently valued at $14.7 billion, according to market data provider PitchBook.

    Discord is similar to the workplace tool Slack. There is no central social feed or timeline of posts for users to scroll through. Instead, it’s split into servers — essentially chat rooms — designed for specific groups or interests. Those servers are further divided into individual topic-based channels.

    Users can join public Discord servers, some of which have millions of members. Some servers are dedicated to discussions about specific games, such as League of Legends or Fortnite, while others are communities where people can talk about art, music, or artificial intelligence. They are similar to Facebook groups.

    There are also private Discord servers, which require an invite to join. These are often smaller communities, sometimes for a group of friends to message each other while online, much like an iMessage group chat. Due to the nature of these small private servers, they often lack the moderation or platform oversight that a larger public server would have.

    Discord has faced several controversies over malicious content on its platform over the years, including white nationalists who staged the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Discord servers, and the gunman who shot 10 killed people in a Buffalo supermarket posting his plans and racist messages on the platform before his attack last year.

    The company has said it has become more serious about content moderation and that 15 percent of its more than 900 employees work on its trust and safety teams. Discord’s Community Guidelines prohibit hate speech, harassment, threats, violent extremism, child sexual abuse material, and misinformation. It was unclear whether the leaked documents violated the company’s guidelines.

    Enforcing the policy has been a tricky issue for Discord, especially due to the small and private nature of many of its servers. The company has strengthened its automated tools for detecting harassing or offensive messages. It also relies on members of Discord servers to report violations to the company. Many Discord servers function as their own miniature governments, with the server’s creator replacing other members to enforce the rules and giving them the power to ban miscreants from sending messages or kick them off the server entirely.

    Discord cooperates with law enforcement by handing over user information and retaining records when it has received an “enforceable legal process,” the company said in an online description of its policy. It also cooperates with authorities when there are cases of “imminent danger” or “self-harm”.

    Last year, the company said it was doing “everything we can to help law enforcement officers investigate” the Buffalo shooter’s posts on its platform. Within days of the attack, the company posted on its website that it had banned the shooter’s account and deleted the server where he posted his diary. Discord said on Sunday it was also working with authorities on the leaked Pentagon documents.

    “With regard to the apparent violation of classified materials, we are cooperating with law enforcement,” a company spokeswoman said in a statement. “As this remains an active investigation, we are unable to comment further at this time.”