There are two types of posters in this thread:
Those who know what online people are like these days on discords/groupchats/youth spaces, and those who don't. I have never once met a girl online who wasn't goaded into anorexia, self harm, poonershit, or some form of sexual abuse.
The edgier the girl, the more insecure, the worse it gets.
I have never agreed with another post more. You are 100% spot on. That seems to be the biggest disconnect that is causing much of the confusion as to how something like this could happen. If you're a zoomer around my age or younger than this makes complete sense. I think alot of people are still operating off the, for lack of a better term, "old internet" mindset where a woman being terminally online or even just online in general is something of an oddity. I'm reminded of the old joke list of "Internet rules" with rule 30 being that there are no women on the Internet. While that was most certainly true back when that was written in the early days of IRC chats and a still developing internet, nowadays, it couldn't be further from the truth.
Slight powerlevel incoming, but it's something I already publicly wrote about in another thread like 6 years ago so whatever. I had a brief stint in an in-patient eating disorders treatment when I was around 13 and literally every single thing you mentioned was something the other residents, who were largely all teenage girls as the program was specifically for youth, were originally exposed to online. Keep in mind, it was already this bad back when I was there
before the invention and widespread adoption of applications like discord. These were girls that got groomed through Pro-ana (pro Anorexia), pro bulimia, and pro self harm
Tumblr pages that they followed.
Those are static web-pages where the viewer has minimal interaction with the author unless they send them a direct message and they were still able to convince a large chunk of impressionable young girls to do horrible things to their bodies. I can only imagine how much worse and more personalized the indoctrination can be when you are secluded into a walled off discord server with nobody able to see what you're up-to which completely eliminates the possibility of anyone from the outside seeing the red flags and being able to intervene.
I know alot of people who graduated from the program that dedicated much of their personal time and energy to reporting and trying to take down pro self harm and pro eating disorder Tumblr/Google+/Twitter/whatever pages and users and reaching out to people who were obviously being negatively influenced by them. I can't imagine how many impressionable teens were potentially saved from a lifetime of medical and psychological issues just from having someone looking out for them.
I'm still friends with a few of those people and atleast according to them it's now MUCH harder to do that sort of selfless work because the groups are no longer out in the open. The disgusting freaks who own pro eating disorder and pro self harm discord servers know that 90% of people won't approve of them grooming impressionable minors into self-destructive lifestyles so they start little private discord servers dedicated to whatever their particular interest is that they can have conplete control over and can vet users to ensure only gullible teens/pre-teens are allowed in and any adult with a fully developed pre-frontal cortex who would obviously take issue with their grooming isn't allowed to see what they're up to.
In my opinion, the worst part is that the Discord staff does
NOTHING to stop this behavior. From what I have been told, even when the Discord admins are notified and shown clear proof that the server is attempting to groom minors into self-destructive lifestyles, they refuse to take action because of their political biases. Keep in mind this isnt me saying this, this is coming from the mouths of zoomer 20-something women who are probably some of the most liberal people ever to walk the earth and even they are aware of how blatantly politically partisan the administration is.
If your server even has the outward appearance of being slightly right-leaning it's super easy to get banned. The slime balls that run the private discord groups are smart and understand this. They know that if they can dress up their grooming with flowery language like saying they're "helping vulnerable youth from abusive households discover their gender identity" that discord won't bat an eye at what they're doing. They can advocate for minors to do horrendous shit like develop eating disorders or start self-harming or lop off their tits because they know as long as they can dress up their grooming under the guise of gender identity that the furry trannies at discord won't do jack shit to stop them.
I can pull up the statistics if anyone wants them, but I feel at this point it's almost self-evident that the majority of zoomers do most of their social development online. Unlike the real world where there are responsible adults present to remove people who are trying to manipulate teenagers into developing extremely destructive and maladaptive lifestyles the internet is basically entirely populated by people millenials or younger who are mentally deranged and wish to indoctrinate others into being as insane and malajusted as they are and there are no reasonable or responsible adults to step in, especially now that the few that do exist don't have access to the areas where most of the grooming is happening.
TlDr: TDD (Total Discord Death) cannot possibly happen soon enough.