The Internet Child Exploitation Unit (ICEU) is arresting a 31-year-old Barrie man alleged to have uploaded child pornography to Discord, a messaging network popular in video gaming circles.
The arrest follows a two-month investigation into the individual, during which police presented evidence to a judge to secure a warrant to conduct a search of his home and seize his digital equipment. After Barrie’s ICEU officers analyzed the devices, the man was charged with two crimes — accessing and possessing child pornography. If found guilty, he faces between one and ten years in prison.
Founded in 2015, Discord is a platform that allows users to communicate with one another using instant messages or through voice or video calls. Conversations may be held or public message boards accessible to any of its 150 million monthly users or on private channels.
According to the tech company’s rules, children over the age of 13 may open an account. While adult users are allowed post legal pornographic material, this is only allowed on forums inaccessible to underage accounts.
Despite this, Cybertip, Canada’s national tipline for reporting the sexual exploitation of children online recently said it received more than 800 reports related to occurrences on Discord servers in 2023. It also found there was a 284 per cent increase in the number of Discord-related reports received in 2022 and 2023 as in 2020 and 2021. Many of the reports related to the violent abuse of underage users.
According to Barrie police, parents can mitigate the risks of using social media platforms like Discord by setting rules around their use. “With any internet sites, rules and guidelines must be clearly identified by parents and followed by their children,” a spokesperson for the Barrie Police Service wrote in a statement provided to the Barrie Compass. “Any failure by the children should be dealt with [through] the removal of internet privileges.”
Officers also say parents should never allow children unfettered access to the internet. “Parents should have computers and devices used by their children in an area that the parents can access and monitor what their children are doing. They should be supervised and no devices should ever be allowed behind a closed door.”
Not all the dangers associated with Discord can be negated by ensuring children only connect to the internet when in full-view of a parent or guardian. In August 2023, Discord went offline temporarily after data from more than 750,000 of its users was stolen and put up for auction online.
