Discord, a vastly distributed social platform, files quarterly safety reports, and the tally of this year's ban numbers is dizzying: from January to June 2022, Discord disabled 55,573,411 accounts and deleted 68,. 379 servers were deleted; the accounts that were banned, which Discord calls "disabled," were overwhelmingly due to "spam or spam-related crimes."

When looking at non-spam crimes, the number of accounts drops to 1,821,721; since servers cannot be spammers under Discord's rules, server spamming would fall into more specific silos, such as unsolicited content, platform manipulation, and illegal activity.

Non-spamming server and account bans are broadly categorized, mostly for child safety reasons, followed by exploitative and unsolicited content. If you are confused about how this works in the seemingly private world of Discord, we have an article for that: How private is your private Discord server?"(opens in new tab) TL;DR: Discord has rules and moderators, but they don't monitor your stream or read your chats 24/7.

The scrutiny of extremism and illegal activity on Discord has been high in recent years, with content that harms children or promotes hate being in the spotlight. Earlier this year, the New York Attorney General announced an investigation into platforms used to spread hate, including Discord, in the wake of the shootings.

By Discord's calculations, bans are targeting the right people, and only a small percentage of account bans that have been appealed have been reinstated. In the first quarter, only 2% were reinstated, and in the second quarter, 0.6% were reinstated. This means that of the 235,945 people who appealed their ban, only 3,098 had their accounts reinstated.

Of secondary interest are the statistics on Discord violation reports. They addressed 24% of reports from January through March and 22% of reports from April through June. [We previously wrote about Discord's never-ending tussle with spammers. (opens in new tab) Discord's spam statistics are fascinating: the vast majority of banned spammers are not even reported by users. Of the 27,733,948 accounts banned for spam in the second quarter, only 7,785,111 accounts were reported by users, or roughly 25%.

You can read the transparency report (opens in new tab) through 2019 on the Discord website.