Around 200 Discord accounts have been reinstated following a bug that led to users being permanently suspended from the messaging service due to grid-based images being wrongfully detected as containing harmful material. It was reported over the weekend that a vulnerability in Discord's AI moderation tools meant the service detected any square grid images wrongfully as containing CSAM.
"Our systems flag content by matching it against known harmful material. This kind of similarity matching can produce false positives, which is why a member of our Trust & Safety team always reviews flagged content before any action is taken," Discord explained in a thread on Twitter/X. It said that the primary focus of flagged content is to pause uploads, rather than ban a user outright.
The bug was what was causing the bans, and the accounts affected by the bug have been reviewed and reinstated. Discord reveals more than 8,000 accounts have been affected by the bug since May of this year, but all have been unbanned.
"We know that's not a satisfying explanation if this was your account, and we should have caught this sooner. We're working on better safeguards so this can't quietly happen again, and more broadly, on making sure our safety systems don't penalize people who did nothing wrong," wrote Discord.
So, if you'd been waiting to show off your Minecraft inventory full of diamonds, but didn't want to get banned by the bug, now it seems Discord's pattern recognition features have been fine-tuned to avoid wrongful bans.
