San Francisco.- For years, an online community of a few thousand subscribers following a YouTube celebrity named wow_mao occupied a small, male-focused corner of the internet. It was hosted on Discord, a social networking app, where wow_mao’s young followers exchanged humorous digital images and told cheeky, even tasteless jokes.
Over the weekend, the exclusive wow_mao community became the epicenter of international attention after news broke that a volunteer moderator of its Discord group posted images of leaked documents detailing top-secret Pentagon intelligence.
All of that was a bit overwhelming for wow_mao, who said in an interview on Tuesday that he was a 20-year-old university student living in the UK. A day earlier, in a YouTube video, he said he was an “internet microcelebrity, and I’d like to stay one.”
The collision of youth internet culture and national security may seem puzzling, but in recent years it has happened frequently. And the appearance of classified documents on Discord was a reminder of how the digital world is increasingly affecting real life, even in ways that can be dangerous.
The Joe Biden administration has worked to limit the damage from the leaked information, which appears to detail national security secrets related to a range of US adversaries, including Russia and China, as well as allies such as Ukraine and South Korea. . The FBI opened an investigation into the leak on Friday, but top US officials have not said much about the leak this week.
“We don’t know who is behind this. We don’t know what the reason is,” John F. Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said Monday. “We don’t know what else may be out there.”
Perhaps no part of the internet has made small talk more easy in recent years than Discord, which began as a haven for gamers before gaining mainstream appeal during the pandemic. Much of what happens on Discord’s servers — a term the company uses to describe its chat groups — is harmless, like music fans talking about their favorite artists and Minecraft gamers swapping memes.
But on the wow_mao server, which is called the End of Wow Mao Zone, and many other servers like it, sometimes the unfiltered and off-color jokes wander into darker realms. Those servers are sometimes described as the less venomous cousins of 4chan, the far-right anonymous messaging site known for sharing conspiracy theories and popularizing QAnon. Many 4chan users split their time between Discord and 4chan, sharing digital memes and chatting with friends.
Dark humor about race or ideology can shape the beliefs of impressionable young people, and innocuous memes can be co-opted as hate symbols, researchers say.
“If you’re a young guy with no prospects hanging out on 4chan, you’re definitely on some Discord servers, and maybe some pretty obscure ones,” said Dale Beran, a Morgan State University professor and author of It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office.
An 18-year-old shooter used Discord to record his thoughts, chat with friends and share racist memes he collected on 4chan before fatally shooting 10 people and wounding three more at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, last year. In February he was sentenced to life in prison.
White supremacists also used Discord to plan the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Since then, Discord has taken steps to improve its content moderation, and in 2020 the company confirmed in a statement that it has the “ responsibility to ensure that Discord is not used for hate, violence, or harm.”
However, the site still relies heavily on user reports to spot issues, particularly on invite-only private Discord servers. Discord is divided into what are basically chat rooms, with large public groups that may have strict content moderation and smaller private ones that may have little or no moderation. The company said it was cooperating with a police investigation into the leaked documents, but declined to comment further.
On Monday, in a live audio chat from wow_mao’s Discord server, users passed the time by talking about movies and complaining about their parents. But sometimes they veered into overtly racist language.
For young people, these irreverent chats can have a special appeal.
“It is the vernacular in which they can answer your questions in the language they understand. They have grown soaked in memes and ironic and complicit behaviors,” Beran said. And he added that these communities may seem benign at first, “but taken to the extreme, they become a very difficult crime problem or a terrorist problem.”
In the past, video game players have leaked classified military secrets to prove their point in online discussions and convince game developers to design more precise combat vehicles.
The New York Times got in touch with wow_mao via his YouTube channel and Discord server, and in an audio call made via Discord on Tuesday, he spoke at length. He said that he spent little time on the Discord server and was mostly focused on his YouTube channel, where he has nearly 250,000 subscribers, as well as his social life and college studies. He did not want to reveal his real name for security and privacy reasons, but he did say that he was British and Filipino.
Wow_mao is not a celebrity in the traditional sense, even among influential internet personalities. But despite his anonymity, his channel has gained a following over the years because his videos have struck a chord with people who share his sense of humor.
He says his videos arose from his interest in geopolitics and history and a desire to make over-the-top videos that were funny solely because he “put so much effort into something so stupid.”
However, he said he was concerned about the tone of the Discord server. Some “very right-wing” teenagers were most likely drawn to its irreverent content, he said, but he did not “at all” share that worldview.
“I just let a bunch of kids get out of control,” added wow_mao. “I regret, perhaps, not having moderated my server a little more.”
However, he said the fact that the leaked documents had turned up there was “hilarious.”
“It just spread to the most private and nerdy parts of the internet,” he explained. “That’s the kind of people who would find those documents: losers. That is what the United States government has to fear.”
Young, tech-savvy people tend to have less respect for the government, wow_mao said, “and will always find it fun to make fun of it and sabotage it in some way.”
In early March, a user of the wow_mao server named Lucca uploaded the pages of classified information, according to screenshots shared by users who had investigated the leak. Bellingcat had already informed about the origin of the documents.
The documents began to attract more attention when they were posted two days later on a server dedicated to Minecraft, where it appears that a user shared them during a discussion.
“Here, some leaked documents,” said the user, before uploading a few pages.
“Great,” replied another user.
The posts reportedly stayed online for almost a month before they began to garner interest outside of Discord. 4chan users posted images of the documents on April 5. A pro-Russian channel on the Telegram messaging app shared the images that same day. Then Twitter users took notice, and so did the world.
The Discord servers and the users believed to be behind the documents received a barrage of attention. A Twitter account by the name of MrLucca, which used the same profile picture found on Lucca’s Discord account, said it had obtained the documents from another Discord server.
“I found the information on a server that is now down and disclosed it,” the user wrote, according to screenshots of the conversation. The Twitter and Discord accounts have been removed.
For users of the wow_mao server, the attention was only a brief distraction between memes and jokes. On Easter Sunday, users mourned the Lucca march with a meme depicting him as Jesus, rising from the grave.
For wow_mao himself, the episode was another content opportunity. He said the number of members on his Discord server had skyrocketed from about 4,000 to almost 7,000 before the news of the documents broke.
“Any publicity is good, I guess, as long as I don’t end up in jail,” he said.
He ended his YouTube video by urging viewers to support him by subscribing to his Patreon, a very popular donation platform among content creators. He then shared that video on Twitter with a message: “The CIA may have put me on their watch list… But I should be on YOURS too!”
