FOCUS: Kyle Chayka | The Privacy-Minded Social Network at the Center of the Classified-Document Leak

 

16 April 23

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FOCUS: Kyle Chayka | The Privacy-Minded Social Network at the Center of the Classified-Document Leak
Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker
Chayka writes: "Late last year, in a chat room on the social app Discord, a user known as OG began publishing transcripts of classified military documents." 

A young National Guardsman posted hundreds of secret government files to a private Discord group. Then they sat there for months unnoticed.

Late last year, in a chat room on the social app Discord, a user known as OG began publishing transcripts of classified military documents. When the text didn’t make enough of an impression on his small group of young friends and followers, the user began taking photographs of the documents and posting those, too. Among them were maps of active battlegrounds in Ukraine and material revealing U.S. efforts to spy on the Russian military and to monitor the leadership of Ukraine and other allies. OG leaked several hundred such documents in total, and for months they remained within the chat room’s circle of roughly two dozen members, who’d been drawn to the group by a common interest in war-themed video games, military gear, Christianity, and crude, sometimes racist or antisemitic humor.

Only last week, after a Times report, did the leaked material erupt into a national-security crisis prompting a Pentagon investigation and calling outside attention to the Discord group, Thug Shaker Central. In a Washington Post story published on Wednesday, a teen-age member of the group described it as a “tight-knit family,” with OG as its magnetic leader. (“He’s fit. He’s strong. He’s armed. He’s trained. Just about everything you can expect out of some sort of crazy movie,” the member said.) On Thursday morning, the Times reported that OG is believed to be Jack Teixeira, a twenty-one-year-old serviceman working in the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. He has since been apprehended by the F.B.I. and charged in federal court with crimes under the Espionage Act. According to one member of the Discord group, Teixeira posted the documents because he “just wanted to inform some of his friends about what’s going on.” (Teixeira has so far not commented publicly on the allegations against him. His parents did not respond to journalists’ request for comment outside the courthouse.)

Discord launched in 2015 as a tool, reminiscent of Slack, for gamers to chat with one another while playing online. In the years since, it has grown into a kind of decentralized social network that by some estimates has nearly two hundred million active monthly users. Where larger social platforms such as Facebook or Twitter are organized around public feeds, Discord allows users to create and manage their own “servers,” or chat rooms, many of which are private, accessible only to those who have been invited by their administrators. Discord users often remain anonymous or use pseudonyms. Each server sets its own tone and its own house rules. This siloed structure makes Discord a relatively conducive place for the kind of contained leak that Teixeira was apparently going for. In Thug Shaker Central, explosive information could be kept within the “family,” at least for a while.

By early March, according to a chronology assembled by the investigative outfit Bellingcat, the documents had travelled beyond Teixeira’s group. A Thug Shaker Central member with the username Lucca shared dozens of documents on a Discord for fans of the YouTuber wow_mao, a self-described “shitposting-Internet micro-celebrity” based in the U.K. (In a YouTube video this week explaining his group’s inadvertent new notoriety, wow_mao said, “You don’t need me to tell you how bad it is to leak secret war documents. I completely denounce this.”) On March 4th, the pictures appeared on a Minecraft-themed Discord server with more than eight thousand members. Still, they drew little attention. “here, have some leaked documents,” the user who posted them there wrote. “Nice,” someone responded. Then nothing happened for another month. By April 5th, the same images could be found on the encrypted chat app Telegram and on the anonymous forum 4chan. The Times broke the news of the leaks a day later.

Even before details of Teixeira’s methods became known, the leaks seemed far from the work of a disciplined whistle-blower. There was the fact that Teixeira’s documents had been haphazardly photographed rather than scanned. In the background of certain images, everyday objects were visible: a Gorilla Glue container, a box for hunting equipment. Edward Snowden’s work of carefully transferring N.S.A. files to journalists was elaborately choreographed by comparison. There was speculation that a Russian party might have leaked the information to sow distrust of the U.S. (Some documents appeared to include doctored numbers of casualties in the war, inflating Ukrainian losses and minimizing Russian ones.) But the Internet-lowbrow social environment of Discord pointed to a simpler motivation: perhaps the leaker was just posting secret documents for online social clout.

The privacy and anonymity of Discord communities has made the app something of a breeding ground for extreme beliefs. It’s known as a space for military obsessives (perhaps because of the tool’s early use as an accompaniment to combat games), and it has become the arena of choice for the excessively online—what Reddit was a decade ago. In 2017, white nationalists used Discord servers to plan the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. In 2022, an eighteen-year-old named Payton Gendron spent months in a private Discord server journaling and planning a racist mass shooting in a grocery store in Buffalo, New York. He discussed purchasing weapons and tallied how many people he was likely to kill. His messages didn’t raise any alarms at Discord until roughly half an hour before the shooting, when Gendron invited other people to join his server and discover what he had written. By then, it was too late to stop him from carrying out an attack that killed ten people. (On Wednesday, in response to a request for comment about the leaks, a Discord spokesperson said, “When we are made aware of content that violates our policies, our Safety team investigates and takes the appropriate action.” According to the company’s latest Transparency Report, seventy-three per cent of servers removed from Discord late last year were taken down “proactively,” before users reported them.)

The rise of Discord has coincided with the erosion of an old framework for online social life. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, engaged in a fitful pivot to the metaverse, is constantly reshuffling Facebook features in a vain attempt to keep users engaged. Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, six months ago, he has gutted the company’s content-moderation staff and demonstrated a distaste for user safety and legal compliance. In Germany, Twitter now faces millions of dollars of fines for failure to remove hate speech. (Last week, Musk mocked the idea of removing the leaked documents that had been shared on Twitter.) Platforms such as Discord and Telegram are attractive because they give more control and privacy to users, creating new opportunities to build digital communities from the ground up. But we are seeing that the increased autonomy also comes at a cost. A decentralized Internet is less easily monitored for harmful content. The bad actors who operate in private groups are harder to identify and shut down. Among other things, the current leak saga is an alarming lesson on how easy it is to remain under the radar in certain online spaces today. If Teixeira’s Discord followers are correct, he cultivated his tiny online domain for the same reasons that many mainstream social-media influencers do: a desire to get attention, to impress, to post something that no one else has. As the Thug Shaker Central member told the Washington Post, “If you had classified documents, you’d want to flex at least a little bit, like, ‘Hey, I’m the big guy.’ ” In the end, Teixeira seems to have succeeded too well.

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