Why I was banned from Discord

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Hi everyone. The reason for this post is two fold. For one, I would like to explain to everyone after a lengthy "investigation" of my own why Discord permanently deleted my account, and second of all, I'd like to make a broader statement about being guilty by association.

This lesson is actually very timely for me, so I'll take to heart as an experience I had to go through. It's not really that serious because I can just make another Discord account, and though it will be a nuisance to rebuild my network from scratch, I guess there are worse things. It's a small price to pay to learn what it's like to be guilty by association.

So basically about a month or two back, I realized that my Discord account had been "deactivated". I was served no notice, given no explanation. I just couldn't access my account.

After leaving it for a while as a strange anomaly I couldn't make sense of, and after wanting to contact some people on Discord, I decided to inquire as to why my account was deactivated and to ask for it to be reactivated.

Someone by the name of Boba Ninja from Discord answered my inquiry, with this to say:

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At first, I read this as a letter that actually made no sense. I was like "conducting raids?" as in playing World of Warcraft and "raiding" a dungeon with friends. I was like that is the most nonsensical and hilarious "charge" you could pin on somebody who was using Discord. 😅

So I e-mailed them back asking them to explain what they meant by "conducting raids". I copied the definition of raid into my e-mail and asked them what they were talking about.

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I couldn't help but add a touch of sarcasm too, which probably was a bad idea given the "hot-water" I was supposedly in... I'm a bit of a dastardly devil. 😏

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Anyways, I got another response, this time a little bit more cut-and-dry. Clearly I had exhausted their patience and they had no interest in discussing with me any further.

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So I told myself just be persistent and ask them to explain, they should have no problem in telling you what you did, right?

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Well, I've sent them another two other emails, but they've simply stopped answering me. I only ever got two responses that said "they have conducted an investigation" and they're not going back on their decision, the ban is permanent. So I guess no amount of arguing or debating will change anything.

So I was sitting back and discussing with my good friend how it was just super weird. I got banned for no reason. I asked them if it was a bot that malfunctioned, or whether a complaint had been launched against me by another user.

The only answer I was going to get was "an investigation was conducted and I was found guilty of raiding".

Now putting two and two together, I figured out that by "raiding" I assumed they meant cyber-bullying, although it really wasn't clear to me at first. But I did dutifully looked up the Community Guidelines and cyber-bullying is expressly forbidden.

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So I understood now what they meant, but I thought this is so weird. How in the world did I get banned for this? Plus, I never received any warnings. It's like I was a repeat-offender and I couldn't quite square the circle how this happened?

I think a lot of people on Steemit would know that I'm pretty far away from the type to engage in cyber-bullying of any sort. It just didn't stick and I couldn't make sense of it.

Anyways, I was talking with my friend, and then he reminded me that like way in the beginning of my time on Steem I had joined this group hosted by Steemit user @activist-news

He seemed like a pretty good guy to me. I had long conversations with him about the world, religion, power, politics. He was clearly an educated, older-guy, and though he was definitely a proud nationalist (okay, read that as white nationalist), and had a bit of anti-semitism about him, I didn't think he was a bad guy. He was genuinely involved in grass-roots online activism and trying to expose corruption in his native country of Australia, engaged in exposing the evils of modern-day real-world zionism, and a whole bunch of other things which I thought are okay under any conception of Free Speech and the right to one's own opinion.

What was really interesting about that group was the fact that it was kind of like this unholy alliance of conservative Muslims and Christians. From time to time I really enjoyed reading the exchanges and I was learning a lot about right-wing conservative white people and Arab people, and was really surprised by how much they had in common and on how many issues they completely agreed. You know? It was a good learning experience and I thoroughly enjoyed reading their thoughts about Christianity and Islam because they were inter-faith cross-cultural exchanges, conducted with a lot of respect. I guess, as you may have guessed, one of the things that united them across the spectrum was a kind of "un-appreciation of Talmudic Judaism", which of course in mainstream society would be carpet-branded as antisemitism, but hey: "I mean what is Freedom of Speech good for if we can't openly discuss our views about religion, culture, morals, politics..." - Right?

Well, while I was discussing with my bro, and I would sometimes send him some little screenshots of the group convos there and we would lol about the kind of dialogues taking place there, but so he told me "Maybe it's because you were in that channel dude".

And then I realized, not only had I been in that channel, which seriously, I mean they might have been a little extreme to the most moderate and centrist relativists among us, but they certainly didn't seem like mean people or bullies to me. They were often on voice chat and talking about the latest pedo scandals and high-power politics stuff... Nothing like "ultra-nefarious and extreme"... Just seemed like they were mostly concerned netizens that seemed to have conservative values... In my book, that's okay...

Everybody can be the way they feel they ought to be, you know?

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Anyway, I remembered when we were talking about that server and me being banned that actually, this guy, maybe a little bit of the nuttier and more unsavory kind, had mean an offshoot group. He'd sent me an invite to his server and I mindlessly joined in... But the group was called "[something] Battalion" and his name was like some German name, but I don't think he was German...

I never spoke a word in his channel or even looked at what was happening. He had just sent me an invite like "Join my channel we'll be talking about stuff and doing stuff"... I guess though maybe I shouldn't have joined what I guess was a national socialist anti-semite's Discord server, am I right?

Even though I never said a word in that channel and never interacted with any of its members... (Bear in mind by this time I was a part of over 50 channels that discussed and did all kinds of stuff, in and out of Steemit)

I guess that joining his Server came back to bite me in the ass

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So even though I never did anything wrong, or even remotely linked to cyber-bullying, I guess I was in the wrong group. Cos' looking back, I can definitely imagine those knuckle-heads starting some flamewars and doing all kinds of nasty things to other Discord users...

So I was guilty by Association.

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Now, even though I did nothing wrong, I think this is a good lesson for me to learn. Because if I was an African American kid in a ghetto in the US and happened to be talking to some of the older men on the block who were involved in drug-dealing, and happened to be there when policemen rolled up on a drug bust... Even if I had done nothing wrong and had never been involved, I might get indicted, and found guilty, just for being there...

Or if I was really good friends with a guy in Saudi Arabia and then a really devout member of the Mosque saw him kissing a boy and decided to report him to the religious authorities for him to receive an unimaginably gruesome punishment, and then everybody thought because I was his best friend, that I was probably a homosexual too, to be punished as well...

Or what-ever kind of bullshit thing that can happen to somebody completely innocent that puts in him in a really hot-mess.

This is actually something my Dad told me is that "when you see people doing something wrong, stay the fuck away"...

This experience hearkens back to my youth when I was playing with these kids, and they started throwing rocks at a window. And I just stood there. Then the window broke and they all started running. Well, quite naturally I started running too. The next day the police were at my door because one of the neighbors had seen me running right around the time when the vandalism was committed. (Duh.)

Guilty by Association. It ain't fair. It ain't right.

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But we have to be mindful that this is a real thing in the world. Nobody wants to be found guilty by association, and suffer an unfair punishment for a crime that was not committed.

So it's just something to be mindful of, when we see people doing things we don't agree with. We don't want to be anywhere near them when they get their comeuppance for fucking shit up.

Anyways, I'll make a new Discord, and consider this a lesson learned.

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PS: I did write Discord a final letter. I told them the following, which is what I honestly believe.

1. Their customer service / customer relations aren't good. Beyond being unhelpful, as someone who absolutely loves the product and could not get any information about his problem, I felt like Discord doesn't value its customers.
2. They revealed that they do not have the resources to conduct thorough investigations, and I suspect there's a hint of also not tolerating free speech and dialogue on the platform.
3. Even though I can just make another Discord and stay away from the trouble-makers; they have revealed that their businesses practices are not in line with minimum standards, because companies that do well care about their users and clients... I would hope they would have the decency to fix my problem, but now I know Discord is not this kind of company. That lack of service will catch up to them when the next best thing comes out.

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If you've missed me on Discord please drop me your Discord details in the comments so I can contact you and get back in touch! Otherwise I'm sure I'll be dropping you mine on one of your posts once my account is created!

Cheers!

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Peace and Love,

Hae-Joo

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Sources: raiding / cyber-bullying / guilty-by-association & My interactions with Discord Staff