Discord is, without a doubt, one of the trendiest services. Hand in hand with the boom of Twitch and online games last year (the success of Among Us was also a success for Discord), this communication platform has been able to take advantage of the circumstances, going from being a virtually unknown service to being on everyone’s lips and even the fact that Microsoft is considering its acquisition and wants to close the deal as soon as possible.
Although at the time Discord was born as a platform directly related to games, over the years its use has spread and, for example, there are already many communities of streamers who have their Discord server, and even groups of friends have created their own spaces or, recently, the community of Twitch channel moderators has begun to organize and collaborate through a dedicated server for this purpose. In this case, for example, the group of friends with whom we play Minecraft, Phasmophobia, and others, we organize and meet in a private Discord server.
This has caused, of course, that the content of the servers is much more diverse, which in some servers has room for specific content for over 18 years (sexual, violent, etc.). To prevent access by minors, these servers are marked as NSFW (Not Safe For Work), and the user must confirm that he/she wants to access them, assuming the responsibility that this entails. Whenever you access a Discord server or channel with this label, you must confirm the operation.
This, however, does not seem to be enough for Apple, which seems determined to decide what we users of its mobile devices can and cannot see. And, as we can read in Engadget, users who try to access Discord servers labeled as NSFW from the app for iPhone and iPad will not be able to do so. None of the companies, neither Discord nor Apple, have confirmed that it is by decision of Cupertino, but given that the app for Android does still allow access to those servers, we think the explanation is more than clear.
This is not something new, back in 2010 we heard Steve Jobs state that one of the main reasons why apps from outside the App Store were not allowed on the iPhone was pornography, “You know, there’s a porn store for Android. You can download nothing but porn. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That’s a place we don’t want to go – so we’re not going to go there,” said Jobs. Today’s Discord is just a continuation of those policies.
If you are an iPhone and/or iPad user and want to continue accessing Discord servers identified as NSFW you still have an alternative, to do it from the browser to the web version of Discord. And this makes even more ridiculous this censorship of the groups, as any teenager with curiosity will take less than five minutes to find this alternative way. However, we remind again that NSFW is not only pornography. It can also refer to violence, black humor, and many other contents that, while not suitable for minors, are legitimate for adults.
