The largest leak of classified Pentagon documents since Edward Snowden has placed a popular free chat platform for the video gaming community in the spotlight.
Discord began in 2015 as a chat app for gamers to discuss strategy in multi-player video games, but owing to its privacy features, it has morphed into a secure space to have secret discussions. This has inadvertently attracted users seeking to disseminate hate speech without being reported.
Unlike most social media, such as Twitter or Facebook, the platform is decentralised, with communities organised into public or private groups known as servers, for gamers to interact. Most servers hosted on Discord are invitation-only and private, not allowing outsiders to find or even search for them.
Each group or server in Discord has several channels, which function as separate chatrooms, divided by topic. At any given time, a server can host hundreds of thousands of users. Discord is currently valued at $15bn (£12bn).
Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old who allegedly leaked the Pentagon documents, was the leader of a private Discord server called Thug Shaker Central, according to court documents. It is in this closed group that Teixeira is accused of sharing hundreds of classified military documents, several including links to CIA briefings.
The Thug Shaker Central server had about 20 members, almost exclusively young men or teenage boys who shared an interest in video games, guns and military gear. Subsequent reports state that racism and antisemitic content were frequently circulated in the group.
What was extraordinary about this leak, is the fact that these documents were reportedly shared from January of this year but went unnoticed and remained within the seal of the group owing to Discord’s privacy features, until one young member, with the username Lucca, decided to share some into a larger, publicly searchable group of about 4,000 members.
“No one thought they were real. It’s stupid to post government documents on Discord, you know? Lucca was like, Oh, hey, guys, look at these funny things I’m finding on this one server. Turns out, not as funny as we thought it was,” Kralj, a Serbian university student who was one of the moderators of the larger group and had known Lucca for several years, told the Guardian.
Screenshots from this group show Lucca posting multiple documents detailing the conflict in Ukraine, maps, intelligence briefings, and other high-security information from 1 March 2023. Kralj confirmed that no one from law enforcement had contacted him or any other Discord moderators.
“Lucca is a young fellow who’s a good guy but bit stupid when it comes to stuff he does online. We asked him not to post the documents and he did it anyway. But only a dozen people saw that post,” he said.
However, one teen user told the Guardian he had spotted Lucca’s posts “thinking they were fake and would make a funny joke”. He posted them on to another Discord server dedicated to the video game Minecraft.
“About a month later, in early April, somebody posted them on 4chan to win an argument. That later got to Russian Telegram channels, where they were doctored,” the anonymous teenager told the Guardian.
It is from Telegram, and subsequently Twitter, that the documents caught the attention of the Pentagon, starting a manhunt that concluded with the arrest of Jack Teixeira on Thursday night.
Part of the appeal of Discord is the relative anonymity it affords users, who are not asked for real names during registration and operate under pseudonymous usernames. However, the Discord internal infrastructure does link usernames and email addresses to the actual web or IP address of the user.
Discord claims not to monitor the conversations within servers, which often have self-appointed or community-appointed moderators doing the job and setting community standards. As a result, standards often vary wildly.
Like many gaming communities, Discord has a reputation for hate speech and misogyny. Servers have been reported for circulating revenge porn, neo-nazism, racism, Holocaust denial, and for providing a safe space to the “alt-right” in the US.
The white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which resulted in three deaths, was organised on the platform. Most of the servers were belatedly removed by Discord, but they raised questions about whether, owing to its lack of moderation, the platform had become a hub for extremists.
