Recently, the Discord app has taken a leading role in the political scene in several countries after playing an active role in organizing protests led by Generation Z. Social media platforms now indicate that the app is banned in Jordan and that a ban is being considered in Egypt.

Neither the Jordanian nor the Egyptian governments have officially announced a ban or taken any countermeasures. Reports about the ban rely on user experiences facing difficulties accessing the app and social media posts.

The global interest in the platform and its recent role raises questions about its main function and nature, and whether it is truly used to incite unrest.

What is Discord?

The platform first appeared in 2015 as a startup project by game developers Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy after their new game failed to achieve commercial success.

Citron and Vishnevskiy’s interest in gaming gave them insight into what gamers wanted from their chat programs. At that time, usual chat apps and social media platforms did not work well with games.

So they decided to launch a chat app and social platform focused primarily on gamers and their needs. They succeeded by using a simple interface that required little effort to control, combined with low-latency chat and voice communication over internet protocols.

Thanks to this approach, Discord attracted gamers worldwide, reaching 10 million active monthly users in 2016, just six months after launch. Today, it has more than 259 million active monthly users.

The platform offers many features that attracted users, including public chat rooms, private rooms, direct messages, voice chat in rooms, and the ability to integrate bots and various services.

It also became known for granting users unlimited access to AI tools, especially image generation tools like Stable Diffusion in its early days.

A Prominent Political Role

The platform’s role shifted suddenly from coordinating gamers to organizing street protests due to its wide popularity among youth, especially Generation Z.

The app now uses a special encryption method called the “Dave Protocol,” which encrypts conversations between users on the platform, including voice, text, and video chats.

Thanks to its popularity, it became the first choice when Generation Z decided to organize protests in countries like Nepal, where the platform hosted recent elections after social media platforms fell.

The same happened in Morocco, where the “Gen Z 212” movement organized anti-government protests using the platform and benefited from its features.

This also applies to protests in Madagascar, Kenya, the Philippines, Indonesia, Peru, and other countries that witnessed similar demonstrations in recent months. This is comparable to the role social media played in Egypt’s January 2011 protests.

Have Arab Countries Banned the App?

Reports indicate that Jordan and Egypt intend to ban the app despite the lack of official statements, but these countries are not alone in this approach.

Several other countries have banned the app for a long time, including Turkey, which officially banned the app’s use within its territory this year and stopped its operation.

The UAE bans video and voice calls on the platform but allows text chats and the use of public and private chat rooms. The app is completely banned in Oman, Iran, and China.