Illegal porn business blooms on Czech Discord
05 February 2025
Thousands of sexually explicit images, videos and child pornography of mostly Czech and Slovak women are being sold on several Discord servers. The explicit materials were taken and shared without their consent. The disseminators included not only adults but also primary school students, as a Czech journalist uncovered in her long-term investigation.
The regulation of illegal content on platforms like Discord is mainly up to the users, who are (in theory) obliged to report it. However, given user anonymity, the possibility of creating private servers, and the inactivity of some moderators, it's currently very difficult to prevent illegal practices that have also occurred on other platforms such as Telegram – see the recent "revenge porn" cases in Serbia and the US.
 | Jakub Roubíček While Czech interior minister Vít Rakušan said he is in contact with the police regarding the case, they can hardly prevent such acts. For us as users, the only effective protection is not sharing sensitive photos, managing privacy settings on social media and enabling two-step verification. From time to time, we should check whether our data has been leaked. In case we encounter some suspicious content, we can only report it and hope that the platform and relevant authorities will eventually intervene. The EU attempts to regulate problematic content as part of the Digital Services Act. However, these measures have not proven sufficient. |
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