Analyzing Political Discourse on Discord during the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election

TL;DR

This study analyzes over 30 million messages on Discord during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, revealing distinct political discourse patterns, biases, and toxicity levels across different server alignments.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale analysis of political conversations on Discord, highlighting platform-specific behaviors and biases during a major election.

Findings

Republican servers emphasized economic policies

Democratic servers focused on equality and progressive causes

Increase in toxic language after Kamala Harris's nomination

Abstract

Social media networks have amplified the reach of social and political movements, but most research focuses on mainstream platforms such as X, Reddit, and Facebook, overlooking Discord. As a rapidly growing, community-driven platform with optional decentralized moderation, Discord offers unique opportunities to study political discourse. This study analyzes over 30 million messages from political servers on Discord discussing the 2024 U.S. elections. Servers were classified as Republican-aligned, Democratic-aligned, or unaligned based on their descriptions. We tracked changes in political conversation during key campaign events and identified distinct political valence and implicit biases in semantic association through embedding analysis. We observed that Republican servers emphasized economic policies, while Democratic servers focused on equality-related and progressive causes. Furthermore, we detected an increase in toxic language, such as sexism, in Republican-aligned servers after Kamala Harris's nomination. These findings provide a first look at political behavior on Discord, highlighting its growing role in shaping and understanding online political engagement.