Is Discord world's most dangerous site? Used by killers, child abusers and now Pentagon 'leaker'

It was the question that last week utterly baffled millions of Americans: just how could a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman obsessed with God, guns, and gaming, sitting alone in his mom’s Massachusetts home, be capable of plunging the country’s entire military and diplomatic establishment into chaos?

But this is the sorry state of national security in the 21st century.

The United States’ most closely guarded secrets – from classified information on Ukraine’s war effort to revelations of clandestine surveillance of U.S. allies – were posted to a video gamers’ chat room. And the world rushed to weigh the damage.

The destructive power of an individual armed with nothing but a computer and a Wi-Fi connection is remarkable in the modern world. And in this case, a social media site called Discord was the weapon of choice.

Now DailyMail.com can reveal how this relatively new and wildly popular platform is attracting hundreds of millions of users with an enticing offer of privacy and stunningly few controls.

A 21-year-old Air National Guardsman obsessed with God, guns, and gaming was capable of plunging the country’s entire military and diplomatic establishment into chaos

The results have been incredibly troubling… and have implications for us all.

HOW A GAMING PLATFORM FOR ALL-NIGHTERS BECAME A ‘WILD, WILD WEST’ WITH SHOCKING CONTENT

Launched in 2015, Discord was founded on the culture of staying up all night to play video games with friends you’ve never met in real life.

Creators Jason Caitron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy chose the platform’s name because, according to a 2015 interview, the gaming community was riven with ‘discord.’

The only way for players to interact was through live chats akin to mass conference calls which often resulted in people chaotically talking over one another. It was an issue they sought to solve, and they did.

Discord exploded in popularity.

By 2021, the company was valued at a staggering $15 billion with an estimated 300 million registered users.

Today, it’s the ‘wild, Wild West,’ according to Adam Levin, founder of cybersecurity firm, Cyberscout.

Unlike other sites such as Facebook and Twitter, Discord does not make money from advertising. Instead, it is backed by private funding and draws on a variety of premium paid-for subscription options for users to access special features.

Maybe above all else, there’s a one feature that attracts Discord’s members – secrecy.

The site does not have a homepage and it does not curate content for users, like Instagram. Instead, members make their own communities and manage who is allowed to join them.

They create public or private chat rooms called servers – where users can interact via messaging, video and audio calls. Invite-only, private servers are not actively supervised by Discord, and the company largely relies on users to self-report dangerous and disturbing content.

‘With Discord, you subscribe to channels and engage in private chat, which is a veil of privacy and secrecy in the way it is constructed,’ Danielle Citron, a law professor at University of Virginia with a focus on digital privacy issues told CNN in 2022.

It’s one of the platform’s greatest draws and, arguably, it’s most concerning.

‘The lack of monitoring, the increased anonymity and the gatekeeping is what sets [Discord] apart from other platforms and allows for nefarious use of the platform,’ digital and cybersecurity specialist Ritesh Kotak told DailyMail.com.

It is true that other platforms offer private groups, but Discord – so far – has dodged the intense public scrutiny of many of its most well-renowned competitors.

It’s also well documented that other particularly secretive messaging platforms such as Telegram and 4Chan have been used for odious purposes. But, perhaps until last week’s Pentagon leaks, Discord has remained less well-known outside of the video-gaming community.

And experts now say it’s this user base – and specifically how young those who play video games tend to be – that makes the site so concerning.

What’s more, while Discord has acknowledged that it has issues with disturbing content and is cooperating with law enforcement following the classified information leak, they have also expressed an unwillingness to take dramatic action to address it.

‘We will not go into a private server unless something is reported to us,’ the company’s marketing chief, Eros Resmini, told the Wall Street Journal in 2019. ‘We believe deeply that privacy is a right and something we should support as a company.’

WHY THE ALLEGED PENTAGON LEAKER WHO PLUNGED USA INTO SECURITY CRISIS IS FAR FROM THE WORST OF DISCORD

Like many young Americans marooned in their bedrooms during the lonely days of the COVID pandemic, Jack Teixeira found community online.

In Teixeira’s case, it was a small discussion group on Discord.

Known as ‘OG,’ Teixeira was the self-appointed leader and administrator of the ‘Thug Shaker Central’ server, a private place for the community of 20 to 30 young men to discuss the interests they shared, including Orthodox Christianity, weaponry, racist memes, and war-theme video games – as detailed by a range of reports.

 Like many young Americans marooned in their bedrooms during the lonely days of the COVID pandemic, Jack Teixeira found community on a private Discord server. He is pictured being arrested on Monday

But at some point, as early as October 2022, Teixeira decided to start showing the members of his private server what real war is like.

Teixeira – a tech support worker with top-secret security clearance to view highly classified material – allegedly began printing out and removing sensitive documents from the Otis Air National Guard Base, near Cape Cod, where he worked.

Initially, he is said to have shared descriptions of classified material about the Ukraine war on ‘Thug Shaker Central,’ but members of the group were apparently not impressed. So, Teixeira began uploading pictures of the documents, according to prosecutors.

That seemed to do the trick.

Teixeira, described as an awkward loner by his former high-school friends, was now an in-the-know hero to the members of his private Discord community.

‘Everyone respected O.G.,’ one of the group members, aged 17, told The New York Times. ‘He was the man, the myth. And he was the legend. Everyone respected this guy.’

But then the stolen information is said to have leaked out of Teixeira’s private server and made its way to a Russian-language channel on Telegram, which is known to be prized by Putin apologists, neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

By April 6, the New York Times had caught wind of U.S. secrets making the rounds on the internet, the Pentagon launched an investigation, and Teixeira was dramatically arrested live on television.

On April 14, the solitary IT specialist, wearing a green t-shirt and red basketball shorts, was taken into custody by a heavily armed federal agents, who descended on his family home in North Dighton in an armored vehicle.

He now stands charged with the unauthorized removal and transmission of classified national defense information and faces up to 15 years in prison.

Yes, Teixeira’s case is extreme, but it is also not the most appalling to play out on Discord – not by a long shot.

INSIDE THE DARK, EXTREMIST CORNERS OF DISCORD – HOSTING NAZIS… AND WITH A SHOCKINGLY YOUNG AVERAGE AGE

In the months leading to the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the young men behind it hung out online in private Discord chat rooms

In the months leading to the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the young men behind it, including main organizers Jason Kessler and white supremacist Richard Spencer, hung out online in private Discord chat rooms with deeply disturbing names including National Socialist Army and Führer’s Gas Chamber.

According to a New York Times investigation, they used the servers to post grossly anti-Semitic Nazi symbols and praise Adolf Hitler.

But they also engaged in seemingly more benign activities, like organizing carpools and arranging for lodging, in the city where they planned to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

At the rally, they carried torches and openly chanted ‘Jews will not replace us!.’ It all tragically turned deadly, when self-described neo-Nazi James Fields drove his car through a crowd of counter-protesters, killing demonstrator Heather Heyer.

Neo-Nazis returned to Discord again to discuss protesting at Heyer’s funeral.

In May 2022, Discord was also the platform on which Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron, then 18, shared his plans to unleash a massacre at the Tops Friendly Markets grocery store.

In a 180-page document and other posts, Gendron explained his motivations and described himself as a white supremacist, fascist and anti-Semite.

He claimed he targeted the grocery store because it had the highest concentration of black people in upstate New York and expressed fears over the bogus ‘replacement theory.’

Gendron invited a small group of people to his private Discord server just 30 minutes before the attack that left 10 people dead.

In a scathing report issued five months after the massacre, New York Attorney General Letitia James concluded that Discord and other online platforms like Reddit, Twitch and 4chan not only played a role in radicalizing Gendron, but also publicized his writings and videos.

‘The tragic shooting in Buffalo exposed the real dangers of unmoderated online platforms that have become breeding grounds for white supremacy,’ James said. ‘Online platforms should be held accountable for allowing hateful and dangerous content to spread on their platforms.’

The independent, non-profit counter-extremism think tank Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) found that Discord and Steam are the worst game-streaming platforms when it comes to politically radical content.

In May 2022, Discord was the platform on which Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron, then 18, shared his plans to unleash a massacre at the Tops Friendly Markets grocery store

Their study of 24 English-language Discord servers associated with right-wing activity found that ‘Discord provides a safe space for users to share ideological material and explore extremist movements.’

And of particular concern to ISD is the age of many Discord members, which they determined was ’on average… 15 years old.’

SINISTER GROOMING MESSAGES THAT LED TO RAPE OF A 13-YEAR-OLD GIRL

Discord’s culture of privacy has been criticized for fostering an environment where child abusers can target minors.

The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCSE) named Discord on their 2022 ‘Dirty Dozen List,’ an annual campaign naming entities that make money from and facilitate sexual exploitation.

‘Discord’s child safety record is poor, given the extensive evidence of children being sexually groomed on the platform,‘ said Tori Rousay, corporate program manager and analyst at the NCSE, told DailyMail.com.

Additionally, ‘Discord does not offer parental controls, so parents cannot monitor or streamline their children’s experience,’ she added. And certainly, there have been recent reporting on minors who were allegedly targeted on the site.

On March 14, police rescued a 13-year-old girl from a locked shed in Lexington, North Carolina, after she went missing from her Dallas home.

Authorities say 34-year-old Jorge Camacho spent months communicating with the teen girl on Discord before he traveled to Texas, kidnapped the child, and raped her.

Authorities say 34-year-old Jorge Camacho spent months communicating with a teen girl on Discord before he travelled to Texas, kidnapped the child, and raped her

‘The content of the chat was consistent with grooming and enticement,’ said Davidson County Sheriff Richie Simmons. ‘He enticed her to leave home where he picked her up in the (Dallas) area.’

In January, Joseph Suarez, 31, was arrested in New York for allegedly using Discord to instruct a 13-year-old boy to record a sex act with a four-year-old girl. Suarez was taken into custody after investigators discovered he had been sharing the abusive content on the platform.

Shockingly, it seems that such depravity is not uncommon on Discord. Last year dozens of men were arrested on suspicion of similar crimes.

Among them was Jalen Kitna, the 19-year-old son of former NFL player Jon Kitna and University of Florida quarterback who was arrested in November for allegedly distributing child sex abuse images on Discord.

A police report said Kitna admitted he’d been a member of Discord servers that ‘discuss, solicit, and distribute child sexual abuse material, but he [tried] to shy away from it’.

At the time, a Discord spokesperson said the company has a ‘zero-tolerance policy for child sexual abuse… We work relentlessly to find and remove this abhorrent content and take action including banning the users responsible and engaging with the proper authorities.'

Former University of Florida quarterback Jalen Kitna, 19, was arrested in November for allegedly distributing child sex abuse images on Discord

'WE BELIEVE USERS SHOULD BE ABLE TO TAILOR THEIR DISCORD EXPERIENCE TO THEIR PREFERENCES – INCLUDING PRIVACY'

 Yet, when contacted for further comment this week after the latest scandal of the Pentagon leaks and asked whether any changes were planned for its content moderation systems, DailyMail.com was directed a series of official blog posts.

‘We carefully balance privacy and safety on the platform. We believe that users should be able to tailor their Discord experience to their preferences, including privacy,’ one potentially concerning post reads.

Site guidelines prohibit violent extremism and child sex-abuse, among other things, but due to the private nature of servers, content is often only removed after it’s reported by other users.

‘We continue to invest in our ability to proactively detect and remove servers before they’re reported to us, especially for high-harm categories,’ a spokesperson added.

Whether U.S. policymakers agree this is enough is another matter altogether.

University of Virginia law professor Danielle Citron believes that Discord has avoided scrutiny because it is a relatively new platform and much of its content is hidden to the public.

But how many more incidents, like the Pentagon leak, can the platform experience before lawmakers and the public take notice?

Currently, platforms like Discord are not legally accountable for the content posted by third parties on their servers.

‘The Internet was supposed to be this wide open space where people of all views could express themselves, and it would be, in certain senses, unregulated,‘ said Adam Levin.

‘Now we're realizing that that these things can run wild. And therefore, how do you regulate these things? Where do we draw the line?’ he asked.

Certainly, these are questions that will continue to rage on in the debate over the role of technology in society.

But one thing is for certain – whether it is on Discord or another platform – the dangers posed by unregulated online communities is very real indeed.