Discord is changing its policies and community guidelines to tackle misinformation related mostly to COVID-19, off-platform behavior, and hate speech, the company announced on Friday. It’s a big policy update in two years and targets individuals participating in violence, harmful anti-vaccination material, or hate speech. However, it seems like if someone doesn’t include misinformation that causes harm, they will not be taking any action against the user. When they decide how they take action, Discord says that they are going to be weighing up the contest of messages, like the likelihood of direct harm or an intent to convince or deceive others.

The change is targeted at anti-vaxxers who post misleading information. Discord will penalize users for harmful behavior. They engage outside the platform, like membership and violent organizations, or just doing anything wrong that was also previously stated in their policy. Discord does take a decentralized approach to moderation and set it apart from platforms like Facebook. Instead of scanning for content violations, they rely on individual servers to moderate themselves and escalate content to Co moderation when necessary.

Discord said that they are going to be doing a lot more machine learning from a safety perspective on conversations that are happening in large public communities. But they said that they won’t be doing that on private DMS and private servers. And if there is a high expectation of privacy in a small group DM, they intend to honor that expectation of privacy.

Discord is also targeting hate speech by expanding its protected attributes to cost gender identity, age, serious illness, and more. As you might have noticed, many of these changes have come from how the world has changed over the past years and how Discord evolved into a substantially big social platform for people to chat and socialize. Gaming is still a very big part of it, there are a lot of other markets that Discord is touching right now.