Discussion boards for video-gaming enthusiasts and music fans seem an unlikely place for the sharing of official government secrets.
But this week, a Pentagon probe into a trove of highly classified leaked materials was traced back to Discord, an emerging chat platform popular among gamers and cryptocurrency investors and known for its light-touch approach to moderating content.
On Thursday, the FBI arrested 21-year-old Air Guardsman Jack Teixeira as part of its investigation into the leak, which constituted more than 100 documents containing sensitive details of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and potential UK government policies on the South China Sea and purported communications between leaders of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency.
According to research by open-source intelligence agency Bellingcat, the documents were first posted early this year on a since-deleted private Discord channel called Thug Shaker Central, a reference to a racist meme common in white supremacist circles. Bellingcat said the channel was made up of around 20 users, who discussed gaming and music, had “staunchly conservative stance on several issues”, and shared racial slurs and memes.
The files later circulated on several niche Discord channels — including one about the game ‘Minecraft’ and another for fans of a Filipino YouTube celebrity — before spreading to online forums 4Chan, Telegram and Twitter until the media reported on their presence.
“In regards to the apparent breach of classified material, we are co-operating with law enforcement,” said Discord. “As this remains an active investigation, we cannot provide further comment at this time.”
Founded in 2015 by video game developer Jason Citron, it has grown to have 150mn users worldwide. One of its biggest appeals is the ability to create invite-only “servers” — similar to chat rooms — often based on a particular interest. That has attracted close-knit groups of people, as well as sprawling, more open forums in which tens of thousands of fans of online influencers congregate.
Through the pandemic, Discord set its sights on wooing a more mainstream audience than just gamers, establishing itself as a mainstay for teenagers, who use the platform to connect with friends mostly through instant messaging and calls, similar to MSN messenger.
The platform also saw an influx of users after far-right platform Parler was temporarily banned by the app stores, according to Adam Levin, founder of Cyberscout. Monthly active users rose 203 per cent in the first quarter of 2023 compared to the same quarter of 2020, according to data from analysts Sensor Tower.
Discord’s popularity among young American men with an interest in warfare, especially military-themed video games, has made it a platform of choice for young soldiers on military bases, said a retired US military official.
Russian, Iranian and Israeli operatives are believed to have tried to use gaming chat rooms, on Discord and elsewhere, to befriend — and eventually recruit — disaffected young soldiers, especially those expressing rightwing, or anti-establishment views in what they considered private chats, the official said.
Even without successfully recruiting someone to actively leak classified information, “these are (chat) rooms with long-running conversations over many months; and even small pieces of information — like working hours for drone operators, or complaints about staffing during holidays — can become actionable in the hands of the enemy”, the retired official said.
Unlike social media giants like Facebook, Discord has chosen to have subscriptions over an advertising-based revenue model. While free for basic use, its paid-for service Nitro costs between $2.99 and $9.99 a month, offering users the ability to upload more content, use custom emojis and improve the quality of video streaming. The company saw a 30 per cent growth in users who pay for a subscription between 2021 and 2022.
“Discord is connecting people that are like-minded, so it becomes a pretty attractive opportunity for brands to engage with a focused community,” said Christina Miller, head of social at marketing agency VMLY&R, who works with food brand Wendys, which has one of the largest servers on Discord with 40,000 members.
But she added that brands need a distinct strategy to communicate with users on Discord, as they cannot advertise on the platform so instead use it for messaging: “The challenge of it is also some of the lures of it. It is not like any other platform because you can’t advertise on it, it is closed.”
As Discord’s popularity has exploded, it has also attracted — and rebuffed — a series of potential suitors, including a $12bn takeover bid from Microsoft in 2021 and reported interest from Twitter, Amazon and Epic Games. The company was valued at $15bn in 2021.
But Discord has also received criticism that its platform is an under-moderated wild west, with its all-night gaming culture creating an environment ripe for the sharing of harmful content.
Discord said that 15 per cent of its more than 900 employees work on the platform’s safety, but would not outline its policy on leaked material. The company uses machine learning to automatically flag content that breaches its rules, alongside user reports and relying on moderators of its individual servers to watch over their communities.
In addition, it has a tool whereby “moderators of servers get access to different content filters that let them automatically detect — and even block — undesirable and risky content before they’re ever posted”, it said.
Hosts of servers largely self-moderate the groups, and set rules and guidelines for what is permitted to be discussed and shared in them. For example, Bellingcat’s discord, which has more than 17,000 members, changed its rules to prevent users from discussing or sharing information relating to the leaks when the news broke.
At the same time, game chat rooms have become places for those trying to avoid online surveillance because of the volume of data on the platforms that mask small text exchanges.
Researchers have found that Isis members have previously posed as gamers and attempted to recruit young people through first-person shooter games such as Call of Duty and on social media platforms. In 2020, the Radicalisation Awareness Network singled out Discord as the main platform used to radicalise and recruit others as Facebook began to more closely police for extremism.
It has also increasingly become an alternative place to buy, sell and share stolen data and hacking tools, according to cyber intelligence group CyberInt which ranked Discord as the third most likely place for cybercriminals to operate, behind Telegram and the dark web.
“Discord became a really significant source and platform of [cyber crime] communication in the past few years,” said Tal Samra, an analyst at CyberInt, adding that it was easy for malicious actors to sign up anonymously and operate in closed servers.
However, he noted a decrease in the usage by cybercriminals and a shift to private messaging on the platform rather than in groups, as Discord has stepped up its moderation in recent months.
Leaks, meanwhile, have become a crucial part of information warfare between Russia and the US, with many social media platforms drawing up their own policies around how to handle the deliberate spread of classified documents.
“The underground has now moved online — it’s no longer people talking about meeting in a dark basement,” Levin said.
Additional reporting by John Paul Rathbone