Originally a social messaging app aimed for gamers, Discord has earned some notoriety of late for reasons that its founders couldn’t have intended. The latest scandal to involve the platform involves Jack Teixeira, who used the platform to leak hundreds of classified documents, which included records of the war in Ukraine.
Teixeira, who went by the username O.G., reportedly started posting annotated discussions of the sensitive documents in a small private Discord server called Thug Shaker Central. Later, he began posting pictures of the records when the members started losing interest.
Teixeira reportedly had access to the sensitive documents because of his work as a Cyber Transport Systems Journeyman at Otis Air National Guard Base in Western Cape Cod, where he worked nightly shifts.
According to a report from Forbes, Teixeira leaked the documents to “show off.” Authorities have downplayed the importance of the documents that Teixeira leaked. US president Joe Biden said the documents leaked were inconsequential.
Meanwhile, a representative of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky said the leak was “nothing more than dust in the eyes.”
Teixeira is now under the custody of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and could be charged for violations of the Espionage act, reports say.
Teixeria’s leak has propelled Discord into the headlines, but this is far from the first time that the gaming-focused platform has been embroiled in controversy.
In 2017, organisers of the deadly 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally at Charlottesville in 2017 was also largely organised inside Discord servers.
Earlier this year, authorities discovered 18-year-old mass shooter Payton Gendron’s private server where he wrote daily journal entries and racist statements for months. Gendron is the culprit behind the Buffalo shooting, which killed 10 African-Americans in one of the biggest hate crimes in recent US history.
Discord servers are functionally like group chats but can be set private or public and are usually dedicated to specific interests. The server Teixeira initially used to leak the documents was invite-only and had 20 to 30 members.
A Forbes report said the Thug Shaker Central server’s members “bonded during Covid lockdowns over their Christian faith, love of guns and crude humour—including racist memes.”
The server has since been taken down, but the classified documents have since appeared in other servers.
For its part, Discord appears to be proactive in addressing these issues. Back in 2017, Discord expanded their Trust & Safety Team to ensure that another event like Charlottesville isn’t organised again in their platform.
“Back then, Discord Trust & Safety was a team of one, just beginning to make difficult decisions about how to properly moderate the platform. Almost four years later, our Trust & Safety Team makes up 15% of Discord’s near-400 employees and splits its time between responding to user reports and now proactively finding and removing servers and users engaging in high-harm activity like violent extremist organizing,” Discord said in a statement.
In response to Teixeira’s actions, Discord’s Chief Legal Officer Clint Smith said the leaking of classified documents were “unusual” on the platform and shared the difficulty of screening classified material. Smith said only authorized government officials can determine which documents were classified or even authentic.
“However, what is clear is that unauthorized disclosure of classified government documents violates Discord’s Terms of Service, which prohibit the posting of illegal content on our platform. Because of this, in connection with this incident, we have removed content, terminated user accounts, and are cooperating with the efforts of the United States Departments of Defense and Justice in their investigation of this incident,” Smith said in a statement.
In the future, the company said they will be incorporating machine learning to enhance their safety mechanisms. In 2021, Discord bought Sentropy, a company that works in AI-powered moderation systems.
“We will continue to balance technology with the judgment and contextual assessment of highly trained employees, as well as continuing to maintain our strong stance on user privacy,” Smith said.
