When we learned that a top secret US military leak had come from a Discord server, we reacted as a lot of gamers probably did: Oh brother! Here we go again. This happens all the time on the War Thunder forums.
But these leaks were a tad more sensitive than those: According to The Washington Post (opens in new tab), the documents included US intel on the war in Ukraine, details about US efforts to spy on allies, and more. Mainstream newspapers are now racing to report every detail of this major event and its global consequences, and the Massachusetts Air National Guard member suspected of posting the documents to his Discord server faces a possible 15 years in prison.
It’s all very serious, but I still couldn’t help but laugh yesterday when I saw “FBI Arrests Leader of Online Group Where Secrets Appeared” on the front page of The New York Times (opens in new tab). “Leader of Online Group?” You mean, the Discord admin who was showing off to his Arma pals?
That’s not to say that the Times didn’t get it—the mainstream reporting I’ve seen has been quite good at contextualizing Discord and the gaming connection for a wide audience. The Washington Post might’ve overemphasized the chat app from my perspective by labeling its coverage “The Discord Leaks,” but it makes sense: To most people, it’s probably a little surprising that a chat group where gamers played Project Zomboid and posted racist memes was the source of a world-changing intelligence leak, and not, say, Wikileaks.
Sounds about right to us, though, doesn’t it? This isn’t the first time that Discord, the application people use to talk to their Minecraft friends, has played a lead role in events with global consequences. During the meme investing spree that took down GameStop shorters, Discord briefly banned the WallStreetBets server for “hate speech,” and prior to that, reports of white supremacist groups organizing in Discord servers led the company to collaborate with the Southern Poverty Law Center for its efforts to remove them.
In South Korea, 2020’s shocking Nth Room Case (opens in new tab) primarily played out on encrypted chat service Telegram, but also featured some crossover on Discord (opens in new tab)—chat rooms on the platforms were used to coordinate and disseminate sexual blackmail. The 2022 Buffalo terror attack was planned on a Discord server and livestreamed on Twitch, leading to calls for stronger surveillance and content moderation.
On Discord and elsewhere, gaming has become entangled with political reactionary groups, instances of violence (swatting, as another example), scams (of the NFT variety, lately), illegal gambling and match fixing, and coordinated harassment. And now, especially this week, intelligence leaks.
I won’t attempt to express all the implications of this new normal, and will just point out one thing I noticed this week, which is that this entanglement between gaming and these kinds of world events led us to pretty accurately intuit what was going on when not everyone did. A week ago, for instance, anonymous US officials were reportedly pointing (opens in new tab) the finger at Russia. And just before the leaker’s identity was revealed, Microsoft president Brad Smith responded to a question (opens in new tab) about the incident by referring to “efforts by the Russians to basically penetrate gaming communities” which they can use to distribute information.
“So you basically know it was the Russians [who leaked the documents]?” the interviewer asked Smith.
“I won’t go further than what I’ve just gone here,” Smith said, “But in truth it’s not the number one thing we should worry about. They’re going to publish information somewhere. It just happens to be a good place for them to get the information into circulation, and then ultimately, journalists find it.”
But it wasn’t “the Russians.” It wasn’t even a Snowden-esque whistleblower like we might’ve expected in the 2010s. It was a PUBG player flexing for his Discord friends, which we kinda figured. In our first headline on the story, we joked: “I can’t believe this keeps happening.”
That’s the 2020s for you: Hedge funds don’t get taken down by thrilling corporate espionage, they get taken down by Reddit dudes who still post Pepe the Frog memes, and Cold War movies aren’t the right referent for political intrigue—look to Discord admin drama if you want to understand the motions of today’s world.
