Taiwan’s Foxconn says building world’s largest ‘superchip’ plant


By AFP
October 8, 2024


Taiwanese tech giant Foxconn says it is building the world's largest production plant for Nvidia's GB200 'superchips' - Copyright AFP WALID BERRAZEG

Taiwanese tech giant Foxconn said on Tuesday it is building the world’s largest production plant for US hardware leader Nvidia’s GB200 “superchips” that power artificial intelligence servers.

Foxconn, also known by its official name Hon Hai Precision Industry, is the world’s biggest contract electronics manufacturer and assembles devices for major tech companies, including Apple.

Ambitious to expand beyond electronics assembly, it has been pushing into areas ranging from electric vehicles to semiconductors and servers.

“We’re building the largest GB200 production facility on the planet,” senior executive Benjamin Ting said at the company’s annual “Hon Hai Tech Day”.

“I don’t think I can say where now, but it’s the largest on the planet,” said Ting, Foxconn’s senior vice president for the cloud enterprise solutions business.

Chairman Young Liu said while opening the two-day event that Foxconn would be “the first to ship these superchips”.

Liu later told reporters the new plant was in Mexico.

Unlike its rivals Intel, Micron and Texas Instruments, Nvidia does not manufacture its own chips but uses subcontractors.

Foxconn also unveiled new electric vehicle prototypes at the tech day — a seven-seater lifestyle multipurpose utility vehicle and a 21-seater bus.

It plans to do with electric vehicles what it did for gadgets — become a go-to contract builder.

Foxconn announced last year that it would team up with Nvidia to create “AI factories” — powerful data-processing centres that would drive the production of next-generation products.

COP29 fight looms over climate funds for developing world

By AFP
October 8, 2024

Poorer countries on the frontlines of climate change will need trillions of dollars in financial aid to install clean energy and adapt to global warming - Copyright AFP LUIS TATO
Nick Perry

The developing world needs trillions of dollars in climate aid, but who should pay for it? Wealthy nations? Big polluters? Countries that got rich burning fossil fuels? All of the above?

A fight over this question looms at crucial negotiations next month as China and other major emerging economies come under pressure to chip in for climate action in poorer countries.

It is hoped a new deal can be struck at the UN COP29 climate conference to greatly lift financial assistance to countries least able to reduce carbon emissions and adapt to global warming.

The present bill of $100 billion a year is footed by a list of countries that were the richest and most industrialised at the time the UN climate convention was written up in 1992.

These donors — including the United States, the European Union, Canada, Japan and others — agree more money is needed, and intend to keep paying “climate finance” where it is needed most.

But they want others to share the burden, specifically developing countries that have become more prosperous and polluting in the decades since the original donor list was drawn up.

China –- today the world’s largest polluter and second-largest economy –- is the obvious target, but Singapore and oil-rich Gulf states like Saudi Arabia could also come under scrutiny.

It is “entirely fair to add new contributing parties, given the ongoing evolution of economic realities and capabilities”, the United States wrote in an August submission to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

– ‘Bad faith’ –

Diplomats from other developed countries have echoed this, arguing that the contributor list is based on outdated notions of rich and poor, and anyone who can pay should pay.

Some have proposed revised criteria against which potential contributors might be judged, such as income levels, purchasing power or their emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases.

Calls to widen the donor base are deeply unpopular and have sparked heated exchanges in the months before COP29, which is being hosted in oil-and-gas-rich Azerbaijan, itself classified as a developing country.

Donors have been accused of forcing the matter onto the negotiating table while refusing to engage on the central question of how much they intend to pay.

For some involved “this was the literal definition of negotiating in bad faith”, said Iskander Erzini Vernoit from the Imal Initiative for Climate and Development, a think tank based in Morocco.

It has “taken up a lot of airtime, and a lot of oxygen”, he told AFP.

“For the sake of all of the poorest, most vulnerable countries of the world, it’s not fair to hold the whole thing hostage.”

Developing countries are pushing for the strongest possible commitment at COP29 to ensure adequate funding for clean energy projects, defensive sea walls and other climate adaptation measures.

Negotiators are nowhere near landing a concrete figure, but some developing countries are calling for over $1 trillion annually.

In a UNFCCC submission in August, the EU warned “the collective goal can only be reached if parties with high GHG-emissions (greenhouse gas) and economic capabilities join the effort”.

– Tough talk –

For developing countries, who pays is non-negotiable: the 2015 Paris climate agreement reaffirmed that developed countries disproportionately responsible for global warming to date pick up the tab.

In a joint statement in July, China, India, Brazil and South Africa strongly rejected “attempts by developed countries to dilute their climate finance legal obligations under international law”.

Azerbaijan’s chief negotiator Yalchin Rafiyev told AFP in September that the gap between the United States and China over the issue was “narrowing”, with a “softening” of stances on both sides.

China, like some other developing countries, actually pays climate finance, it just does so on its own terms.

Between 2013 and 2022, China paid on average $4.5 billion a year to other developing countries, the World Resources Institute (WRI) wrote in a September paper.

This amounted to roughly six percent of what developed countries paid over the same period, said the US-based think tank. China is not required to report this to the UNFCCC, and it is not counted toward the collective target.

Analysts say any formal additions to the donor list at COP29 are very unlikely, though some countries may agree to voluntary contributions in support of the broader goal.

Tragedy of Madrid street sweeper highlights how heatwaves kill


By AFP
October 7, 2024

Miguel Angel Gonzalez holds a pictures of his father, who died from heatstroke

 - Copyright POOL/AFP/File Moritz Frankenberg

Marie GIFFARD

Three hours into his shift as a street sweeper in Madrid on a summer afternoon when temperatures went above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), Jose Antonio Gonzalez fainted from heatstroke. He died the next day in hospital.

With the Spanish capital on heatwave alert, the 60-year-old had set out for work that day in July 2022 with two two-litre bottles of water and a spray bottle to cool off.

“He knew he had to keep hydrated. But that day, it obviously wasn’t enough,” Gonzalez’s son Miguel Angel told AFP.

Gonzalez had only recently started a one-month contract as a street sweeper. He normally worked the cooler morning shift but had swapped shifts as a favour to a colleague and began at 2 pm, when temperatures were at their highest.

His death made headlines in Spain and thrust the spotlight on the threat posed by scorching temperatures, especially to outdoor workers and the more vulnerable.

– Organs began to fail –

When emergency services arrived in the working-class neighbourhood in southeastern Madrid where Gonzalez had collapsed, they found his body temperature was 41.6 degrees Celsius.

They applied ice to his neck and armpits to try to cool him down, hydrated him with a saline solution and put him under a hypothermic blanket before rushing him to hospital, said a spokeswoman for Madrid’s emergency services.

His liver and kidneys were already failing by the time his family arrived at his bedside and doctors gave them “no hope”, Miguel Angel said.

“His back was purple as if he’d been on the ground for a long time… He had a lot of equipment around him, like an ice shield and several fans. He was lying down with his eyes covered,” he said.

Gonzalez died on July 16, 2022. His death certificate said he suffered fatal organ failure due to high body temperatures. His death was classified as a workplace accident.

“When body temperature rises above 40 degrees Celsius, the defence mechanisms we have to combat heat, such as sweating, stop working,” the spokesman for the Spanish Society of General and Family Physicians (SEMG), Lorenzo Armenteros del Olmo, told AFP.

In scorching temperatures the body pushes blood quickly to the skin where it can release heat, reducing the flow to internal organs.

– ‘Hard to talk’ –

“It affects the whole body and that’s when the organs start to fail,” said Eduard Argudo, an intensive care doctor at Barcelona’s Vall d’Hebron hospital, adding quick medical care is key to avoiding irreversible organ failure.

“Sometimes the damage is such that, even if we manage to control the temperature, we can’t reverse the damage to the organs,” he told AFP.

“Heatstroke is a medical emergency, and these patients always go into intensive care,” he added, warning it has a “high mortality rate”.

With climate change likely to drive temperatures even higher in coming years, the dangers look set to rise even further.

Miguel Angel said that a few days before his father died, he crossed paths with him on the train as Gonzalez was coming home and “he told me it was hard for him to talk because of the heat he was feeling”.

“When he got home, after greeting us, the first thing he would do is go to the swimming pool to cool off,” his son added.

Gonzalez’s death shook up public opinion in Spain and led Madrid city hall to adopt measures halting outdoor work during heatwaves as well as to avoid working in the hottest hours of the day during.

A Madrid park now bears his name.

Miguel Angel said that after his father passed away he was on his computer and saw he had recently done a Google search on “What to do about heatstroke”.

'Dangerous': FCC puts DeSantis on notice over threats to prosecute Florida TV stations

Erik De La Garza
October 9, 2024 

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis speaking at Lynchburg, Virginia, on April 14, 2023. (Shutterstock.com)

The Federal Communications Commission aimed at Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) Tuesday for his administration’s threats to criminally prosecute Florida television stations if they refuse to stop running a political advertisement supportive of a ballot measure that would expand abortion access in the Sunshine State.

“The right of broadcasters to speak freely is rooted in the First Amendment,” FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement Tuesday. “Threats against broadcast stations for airing content that conflicts with the government’s views are dangerous and undermine the fundamental principle of free speech.”

The war of words erupted in response to a cease-and-desist letter the state Department of Health sent to television stations last week. The warning letter stems from a political ad featuring a woman who was diagnosed with brain cancer two years ago while pregnant with her second child, the Miami Herald reported.

In the ad, the woman says Florida’s six-week abortion ban would have prevented her from receiving a life-saving abortion, according to the publication.

Nearly a week after the state issued its warning, the ad continues to play. Attorneys representing a political action committee sponsoring the abortion ballot measure also issued a defiant legal letter in which they call threats by the DeSantis administration an “unconstitutional state action,” the Florida newspaper noted.

If the advertisement was not taken down within 24 hours, the general counsel for the state agency, John Wilson, said TV stations could face criminal prosecution, adding that “creating, keeping, or maintaining a nuisance injurious to health is a second-degree misdemeanor” under state law, according to the Herald.

The FCC chair said in her statement directed at Florida officials that she had previously spoken out following the presidential debate in September by rejecting calls by Trump to revoke ABC’s license.

'Massive wage slavery': Trump spurs outcry with latest campaign trail promise

Kathleen Culliton
October 9, 2024 

Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump makes a campaign stop at manufacturer FALK Production in Walker, Michigan, U.S. September 27, 2024. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Former President Donald Trump's latest campaign pledge is spurring calls of alarm from critics who say the Republican presidential nominee would send the nation back to the economic dark ages.

Trump told rally-goers Wednesday in Pennsylvania that he would implement tariffs that he claimed would bring the U.S. back to prosperity seen at the turn of the 20th Century.

"That was when our country was the richest it ever was," said Trump. "It was never rich like that...we had so much money we didn't know what to do with it."

ALSO READ: 'Trump inflation bomb' coming should he win second term: Nobel Prize-winning economists

Trump promised "pretty stiff tariffs" that he said would flush hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy.

The former president drew a direct correlation to the Gilded Age when affluent businesses earned the name "robber barons" by monopolizing industries and receiving enormous profits.

While proponents argue this was a golden age of capitalism, critics say captains of industry were the pioneers of organized crime, according to Stephen Schneider, Britannica author and criminology professor at Saint Mary's University.

Trump's comments re-ignited an age-old debate Wednesday.

"I've been telling you this--Trump thought our nation was 'great' during the Gilded Age, the Robber Baron years--that's what he wants to bring back," rhetorician Jennifer Mercieca wrote on X.

"Massive wage slavery, factory towns, filthy water & air, no regulations on food or business. His policies only help the ultra rich."

"Tariffs are a tax on all of us," replied Andy Roddick, the former tennis player and major champion.

"Tariffs are a tax on Americans," added political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen. "Everyone in the country would pay more, all because this imbecile doesn’t know basic economics."

Zephyr Teachout, the law professor and Democrat who challenged New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2014, decried Trump's rhetoric — but also the attacks in response.

"Just because Trump is full of tariff nonsense doesn't mean he should make everyone else nonsensical," Teachout wrote. "Tariffs can be good! Biden's new tariffs were more much more strategic than Trumps. They can also be bad! But the more Trump traps Dems into saying tariffs are bad, he wins."

A recent study from the Peterson Institute for International Economics projected Trump's proposed tariffs on foreign goods would damage the American economy by increasing inflation and lowering employment for decades.

Watch the video below or click here.

'Out and out brawl': AOC threatens billionaires playing 'footsie' with Harris ticket

Matthew Chapman
October 9, 2024 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Shutterstock)

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) took to X on Wednesday with a stark message for billionaires: Just because you support the Democratic ticket, doesn't mean that its policy and hiring choices are for sale.

The controversy stems from Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission under the Biden administration and an outspoken trustbuster who wants to break up tech monopolies.

"Let me make this clear, since billionaires have been trying to play footsie with the ticket: Anyone goes near Lina Khan and there will be an out and out brawl. And that is a promise," wrote Ocasio-Cortez. "She proves this admin fights for working people. It would be terrible leadership to remove her."

Several business executives who generally back the Democratic ticket have expressed reservations over Khan's policy.

Technology and entertainment billionaire Mark Cuban, a surrogate for the Harris campaign, has nudged Harris to choose someone else for FTC chair if elected, saying, "By trying to break up the biggest tech companies, you risk our ability to be the best in artificial intelligence."

Another wealthy executive, Expedia owner Barry Diller, has called Khan a "dope" who opposes "almost anything" business leaders support — and he notably owns companies the FTC is investigating.

All of this comes amid a growing bipartisan skepticism about the power of tech companies and whether their structure is stifling competition in the market.

One of the biggest such debates is playing out in a landmark antitrust trial against Google, which is accused of illegally monopolizing the search engine market by setting up agreements with smartphone manufacturers to default users to their services. A second case against Google running at the same time alleges the tech giant also holds a monopoly on internet advertising, effectively forcing huge numbers of web pages across the internet to change their own content.

Tim Walz appears on World of Warcraft Twitch stream in latest outreach to young voters

Matthew Chapman
October 9, 2024 

Harris-Walz campaign

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz appeared on a Twitch stream of the popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft for an unorthodox voter outreach event, reported Wired.

The event, which started at 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time, was set as of publication time to "include a live feed of Walz’s Arizona speech with Preheat, a Twitch creator, playing the game and providing commentary. Preheat is expected to highlight their connection to the campaign and encourage viewers to make a plan to vote," reported Makena Kelly.

The Harris campaign's presence on the game streaming platform Twitch began around the time of the Democratic National Convention, when their account was created to stream Vice President Kamala Harris' acceptance speech, the report continued.

"Joining Twitch was part of the campaign’s strategy to reach young, disaffected voters, a campaign spokesperson said at the time," with one spokesperson telling Wired, “Our job as the campaign is to break through a historically personalized media landscape, taking the VP and her vision for the future directly to the hardest-to-reach voters and those who will decide this election.”

In recent days, Harris and Walz have been on a whirlwind media tour, including on several unconventional platforms.

One of the most well-publicized of these recent events was Harris' interview on the "Call Her Daddy" podcast with Alexandra Cooper, whose show achieves millions of downloads from a broad cross-section of voters every week.

Former President Donald Trump reacted to that interview by lashing out at Cooper at his campaign rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania, proclaiming that she is "dumb."

Trumpet star Marsalis says jazz creates 'balance' in divided world

Agence France-Presse
October 9, 2024 

Wynton Marsalis (ADEK BERRY/AFP)

Renowned American trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis believes the universal language of jazz can bridge divides with a common story of humanity.

Marsalis -- who sat down with AFP in Beijing as he kicked off a series of performances in China -- has charted a decades-long career that has seen him win nine Grammys and tour the world with his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO).

The 62-year-old is a passionate educator, often emphasising the power of jazz as a way to heal social and political woes.

"The art of jazz is the art of achieving balance," Marsalis told AFP.

"There's nothing that the world needs more at this time than to be able to communicate differences of opinion," he added.

Born in 1961 into a family of celebrated musicians, the New Orleans native grew up immersed in the American South's rich cultural heritage.

Marsalis originally intended to pursue classical music as his primary profession, enrolling in New York's prestigious Juilliard School in 1979.

But he soon reconsidered, landing early partnerships with towering figures in jazz including Art Blakey and Herbie Hancock before embarking on his own career.

- Pathways 'to communicate' -


"I draw inspiration from everywhere," said Marsalis.

"It could be from a pretty lady, it could be a poem that I read, it could be the way a person speaks," he added.

"I can write frivolous things that are just happy and then I can write very serious things that are about serious subjects like life and death and prejudice and ignorance.


"I don't feel relegated to one or the other."

Throughout his decades in the limelight, Marsalis has not shied away from using his musician's perspective to shine a light on touchy political issues.

He compared recent tensions between the United States and China to his own childhood experiences.


While growing up, "my brother could not sleep without music on, and I could not sleep with music on. We have to figure out how to achieve balance.

"I don't go to other people's countries to proselytise or tell them what they should be doing.

"I'm a guest, and I come there trying to figure out what it is that we have in common that I can accentuate to ease the pathways for us to communicate."


- 'Crisis of identity' -

Marsalis called the upcoming US presidential election -- a bitterly contested matchup pitting former president Donald Trump against current Vice President Kamala Harris -- "a crisis of identity".

Marsalis has been a vocal critic of racism in the United States, once referring to Trump's call to build a wall on the southern border to keep Mexican immigrants out as "cheap populism".

But he has also encouraged broad-mindedness, angering many in 2017 when he offered to perform at Trump's inauguration following his shock victory.

This year's presidential contest represents "a referendum on the soul of the country," Marsalis told AFP.

The veteran jazzman has a reputation for respecting history and tradition, having once eschewed the introduction of electric sounds in the genre popularised in the 1970s by innovators like Miles Davis.

Marsalis's reverence for the heritage of his craft is deeply personal.

His father -- Ellis Marsalis Jr., also a New Orleans native -- was a prominent jazz pianist and educator. He passed away in 2020 from Covid at the age of 85.

Marsalis says he doesn't have a strong ambition to shape the way history will remember him.

"I'm part of a legacy," he explained.

"My father, he passed away, but I try to live up to what he did and continue things.

"There are going to be other people who will do things, and they'll do significant things.

"The world is a very complicated place."

How foreign operations are manipulating social media to influence you

The Conversation
October 9, 2024 

Cell phone (AFP)

Foreign influence campaigns, or information operations, have been widespread in the run-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Influence campaigns are large-scale efforts to shift public opinion, push false narratives or change behaviors among a target population. Russia, China, Iran, Israel and other nations have run these campaigns by exploiting social bots, influencers, media companies and generative AI.

At the Indiana University Observatory on Social Media, my colleagues and I study influence campaigns and design technical solutions – algorithms – to detect and counter them. State-of-the-art methods developed in our center use several indicators of this type of online activity, which researchers call inauthentic coordinated behavior. We identify clusters of social media accounts that post in a synchronized fashion, amplify the same groups of users, share identical sets of links, images or hashtags, or perform suspiciously similar sequences of actions.

We have uncovered many examples of coordinated inauthentic behavior. For example, we found accounts that flood the network with tens or hundreds of thousands of posts in a single day. The same campaign can post a message with one account and then have other accounts that its organizers also control “like” and “unlike” it hundreds of times in a short time span. Once the campaign achieves its objective, all these messages can be deleted to evade detection. Using these tricks, foreign governments and their agents can manipulate social media algorithms that determine what is trending and what is engaging to decide what users see in their feeds.

Adversaries such as Russia, China and Iran aren’t the only foreign governments manipulating social media to influence U.S. politics.

Generative AI

One technique increasingly being used is creating and managing armies of fake accounts with generative artificial intelligence. We analyzed 1,420 fake Twitter – now X – accounts that used AI-generated faces for their profile pictures. These accounts were used to spread scams, disseminate spam and amplify coordinated messages, among other activities.

We estimate that at least 10,000 accounts like these were active daily on the platform, and that was before X CEO Elon Musk dramatically cut the platform’s trust and safety teams. We also identified a network of 1,140 bots that used ChatGPT to generate humanlike content to promote fake news websites and cryptocurrency scams.

In addition to posting machine-generated content, harmful comments and stolen images, these bots engaged with each other and with humans through replies and retweets. Current state-of-the-art large language model content detectors are unable to distinguish between AI-enabled social bots and human accounts in the wild.

Model misbehavior

The consequences of such operations are difficult to evaluate due to the challenges posed by collecting data and carrying out ethical experiments that would influence online communities. Therefore it is unclear, for example, whether online influence campaigns can sway election outcomes. Yet, it is vital to understand society’s vulnerability to different manipulation tactics.

In a recent paper, we introduced a social media model called SimSoM that simulates how information spreads through the social network. The model has the key ingredients of platforms such as Instagram, X, Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon: an empirical follower network, a feed algorithm, sharing and resharing mechanisms, and metrics for content quality, appeal and engagement.

SimSoM allows researchers to explore scenarios in which the network is manipulated by malicious agents who control inauthentic accounts. These bad actors aim to spread low-quality information, such as disinformation, conspiracy theories, malware or other harmful messages. We can estimate the effects of adversarial manipulation tactics by measuring the quality of information that targeted users are exposed to in the network.

We simulated scenarios to evaluate the effect of three manipulation tactics. First, infiltration: having fake accounts create believable interactions with human users in a target community, getting those users to follow them. Second, deception: having the fake accounts post engaging content, likely to be reshared by the target users. Bots can do this by, for example, leveraging emotional responses and political alignment. Third, flooding: posting high volumes of content.

Our model shows that infiltration is the most effective tactic, reducing the average quality of content in the system by more than 50%. Such harm can be further compounded by flooding the network with low-quality yet appealing content, thus reducing quality by 70%.

Curbing coordinated manipulation

We have observed all these tactics in the wild. Of particular concern is that generative AI models can make it much easier and cheaper for malicious agents to create and manage believable accounts. Further, they can use generative AI to interact nonstop with humans and create and post harmful but engaging content on a wide scale. All these capabilities are being used to infiltrate social media users’ networks and flood their feeds with deceptive posts.

These insights suggest that social media platforms should engage in more – not less – content moderation to identify and hinder manipulation campaigns and thereby increase their users’ resilience to the campaigns.

The platforms can do this by making it more difficult for malicious agents to create fake accounts and to post automatically. They can also challenge accounts that post at very high rates to prove that they are human. They can add friction in combination with educational efforts, such as nudging users to reshare accurate information. And they can educate users about their vulnerability to deceptive AI-generated content.

Open-source AI models and data make it possible for malicious agents to build their own generative AI tools. Regulation should therefore target AI content dissemination via social media platforms rather then AI content generation. For instance, before a large number of people can be exposed to some content, a platform could require its creator to prove its accuracy or provenance.

These types of content moderation would protect, rather than censor, free speech in the modern public squares. The right of free speech is not a right of exposure, and since people’s attention is limited, influence operations can be, in effect, a form of censorship by making authentic voices and opinions less visible.


Filippo Menczer, Professor of Informatics and Computer Science, Indiana University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Discord seen as online home for renegades

San Francisco (AFP) – Known for its appeal to online renegades, chat platform Discord finds itself in the crosshairs of Turkey and Russia.


Issued on: 09/10/2024 - 

Discord loose controls and distributed model has made fans of hackers, gamers, shooter-game fans and folks who simply like the idea of being a bit freer to say or share what they want with others on the platform 

© Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV / AFP
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Turkey on Wednesday said it was banning Discord under the auspices of protecting young people from abuse.

A day earlier, Russia's telecoms watchdog Roskomnadzor announced that Discord was being "restricted" due to violation of requirements pertaining to "preventing the use of messaging for terrorist and extremist purposes".
Gamer chat

San Francisco-based Discord was created in 2015 primarily as a platform for people to chat while playing video games, but it has also become a home for folks disenchanted with social media stalwarts like Facebook, Instagram or X, formerly Twitter.

Discord allows communities to set up something called servers, which are virtual spaces where users can chat, share media, and connect with other users who share similar interests.

The platform allows voice and video calls along with text messaging, and sharing of media in exchanges that can be private or done openly in virtual communities.
Free to speak

Similar loosely run forums exist at Reddit, with most of the groups connecting over benign topics like hobbies or games, but always with a tinge of being free from censors that some believe hold too much sway over posts at Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat.

An attraction of Discord is that the system is "distributed" from the perspective of how software and data are hosted online, meaning no central entity has complete control over it.

Discord has 150 million users around the world, according to internal data.

The leading Discord server as of April of this year was one dedicated to artificial intelligence powered text-to-image tool Midjourney with some 20 million users, according to Statista.

Discord revenue sources include partnerships and subscriptions for premium features.

After recent controversies, Discord has held firm that user safety is a priority and that content violating its policies can get people banned or servers shut down.
Not playing nice

Discord was thrust into the headlines when a trove of sensitive US documents about the war in Ukraine ended up in a chat room on the site in early 2023.

It was not seen as a surprise that hackers and soldiers inclined to play shooter games might be comfortable sharing top secret information on Discord, known for loose control and anonymity.

Discord previously landed in hot water for playing a role in a 2017 right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Virginia which erupted in violence and left one person dead.

The FBI found Discord chats where a white supremacist leader seemed to encourage violence at the event, and Discord said afterward that it banned servers promoting neo-Nazi ideology.

Discord has also been accused of being used to share child pornography and by predators to communicate with minors.

© 2024 AFP