When Discord’s CEO appears before Congress on Wednesday, he’ll face predictable questions about content moderation, online radicalization, and political violence. These are important questions. But after five years running a Discord server for boys in middle school and high school, I can tell you: if that’s all senators ask, they’ll miss the real story.
The hearing invitation was issued after the politically motivated assassination of Charlie Kirk. Authorities report that the suspect, Tyler Robinson, confessed to the killing on Discord and was described as deeply involved in online culture.
The conversation we’re having about Discord—and other platforms like Twitch and Reddit—keeps diagnosing the wrong problem. We’re focused on what these platforms allow, when we should be asking instead what boys need.
On NGM Alliance, the Discord server my colleagues and I run for 7th- to 12th-grade boys through Next Gen Men, I’ve seen young teenagers share about getting stressed out by school or rejected by a girl, trying to curb substance use or struggling with suicidal thoughts. Each time, other youth have offered support, shared resources or ideas, and—perhaps most importantly—let him know he wasn’t alone.
This vulnerability happens over months and years of not just gaming together, but navigating how to talk about feelings, how to challenge harmful ideas, and how to really show up for each other. They’ve built a culture that stands apart from the toxic or hypercompetitive spaces that dominate teenage boys’ online lives—and they built it on Discord.
Read more: Discord – TIME100 Most Influential Companies 2023
These aren’t exceptional kids. They’re seeking the same things every teenager seeks: authentic connection alongside opportunities to build competence, develop agency over their lives, and gain a sense that they matter beyond themselves. The Circle of Courage—an Indigenous framework shared by Sioux researcher Martin Brokenleg—names these as belonging, mastery, independence, and generosity. Boys feel these needs as much as anyone else.
Boys who can’t find these things in healthy spaces don’t stop looking, however. Extremist spaces will find them first.
The manosphere—an intersecting web of influencers and communities that run the gamut from self-improvement to neo-misogyny and white supremacy—offers a counterfeit version of these needs. It promises belonging, but through us-versus-them hyperbole. It offers mastery, but through the domination of others. It twists independence into isolation and the rejection of “weakness,” and leads boys into inflexible adherence towards a set of cultural norms that harms them and the people around them.
This isn’t accidental. U.S.-based organization Equimundo recently released a report on the manosphere that focuses on the tactics of exploitative actors who identify the boys in crisis and build community around them before deepening their indoctrination, monetizing their loyalty, and politicizing their beliefs.
So sure, pushing tech companies to reduce harm is an important step in the new playbook. It’s just not the first step.
Five years and almost a million messages exchanged on NGM Alliance have taught me that for boys to disentangle themselves from the draw towards extremist spaces, they need healthy alternatives that meet their authentic needs for connection, competence, agency, and meaning.
On Wednesday, senators will rightly push Discord on safety features and content policies. Regulation has its place. I know Discord’s safety and policy teams understand this—they’ve been working to support healthy communities like ours. But that work needs to be matched with investment beyond any single platform.
Discord isn’t the problem—it’s an example of the infrastructure that makes a healthy community possible. The question is: What kind of communities are being built on that infrastructure? And are we resourcing the people who know how to build healthy ones?
That means funding youth-serving nonprofits who can moderate online spaces the way we moderate ours. It means training educators to start conversations rather than shut them down when boys share harmful content. It means recognizing that all behavior is a strategy to meet a need, and getting curious about which needs aren’t being met.
It means investing in mentorship programs, peer-to-peer spaces, and resources for community building that explicitly cultivate belonging without tribalism, mastery without domination, independence without isolation, and purpose beyond profit. Schools need support to create these spaces. Youth organizations need resources to scale them. Even platforms themselves could fund the community moderators and facilitators who understand this work.
Discord’s executives can promise better content moderation and oversight. That matters. But no amount of technical filtering will solve the underlying problem: a generation of boys seeking connection, growth, and meaning in a culture that consistently offers them toxic shortcuts instead of real community.
I’ve spent more than five years watching what’s possible when we build the alternative. Boys don’t need to be rescued from Discord—they need us to build better spaces worth showing up for. The question Congress should ask on Wednesday isn’t just, “How do we make Discord safer?” It’s: “Why are we better at regulating platforms than funding the alternatives boys actually need?”
The post Congress is Asking the Wrong Questions About Discord and Boys appeared first on TIME.
