An online community of a few thousand subscribers following a YouTube celebrity named wow_mao had occupied a small, very male-oriented corner of the internet for years. It was hosted on Discord, a social media app, where young people who were fans of wow_mao exchanged humorous digital images and told sharp, sometimes tasteless jokes.
Over the weekend, wow_mao’s niche community received international attention after it was revealed that a volunteer moderator had posted images of leaked documents detailing classified intelligence from the Pentagon to his Discord group.
It was all a bit much for wow_mao, who said in an interview on Tuesday that he was a 20-year-old student living in Britain. In a YouTube video the day before, he said he was a “micro-celebrity on the internet, and I’d like to keep it that way.”
The clash of internet youth culture and national security may have seemed baffling, but it’s become more and more common in recent years. And the emergence of classified documents on Discord was a reminder of how the digital world has increasingly influenced real life in sometimes dangerous ways.
The Biden administration has made efforts to contain damage from the leaked information, which appears to contain 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 Federal Bureau of Investigation opened an investigation into the leak Friday, but senior U.S. officials have said little about it this week.
“We don’t know who is behind this. We don’t know what the motive is,” National Security Council spokesman John F. Kirby said Monday. “We don’t know what else is out there.”
Perhaps no part of the internet has facilitated more free-flowing, frivolous chatter in recent years than Discord, which began as a haven for video game players before going mainstream during the pandemic. Much of what happens on Discord servers — the term the company uses to describe its chat groups — is harmless, like music fans discussing their favorite artists and Minecraft video game players exchanging memes.
But the unfiltered, edgy banter in the wow_mao server, which is called the End of Wow Mao Zone, and many other servers like it, can sometimes drift into darker territory. Those servers are sometimes described as the less toxic cousins of 4chan, the far-right anonymous message board known for sharing conspiracy theories and popularizing QAnon. Many 4chan users divide their time between Discord and 4chan, sharing digital memes and chatting with friends.
Dark humor about race or ideology may ultimately shape impressionable young people’s beliefs, and innocent memes may be co-opted into symbols of hate, researchers say.
“If you’re a young man with no prospects hanging out on 4chan, you’re definitely on some Discords and probably some pretty dark Discords,” said Dale Beran, a lecturer at Morgan State University and the author of “It Came from Something Horrible: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Put Donald Trump in Office.”
An 18-year-old gunman used Discord to record his thoughts, chat with friends and share racist memes he collected from 4chan before shooting 10 people and wounding three others in a Buffalo supermarket last year. He was sentenced to life in prison in February.
White supremacists also used Discord to plan the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Discord has since taken steps to improve content moderation, writing in 2020 that it has a “responsibility to ensure Discord is not using for hate, violence or harm.”
But the site still largely relies on reports from users to track down issues, especially in private Discord servers that are invite-only. Discord is divided into what are essentially chat rooms, with large public groups that can have strict content moderation and smaller private groups that can have little or none at all. Discord said it was cooperating with a law enforcement investigation into the leaked documents, but declined to comment further.
In a live audio chat on the wow_mao Discord on Monday, users largely passed the time talking about movies and complaining about their parents. But they sometimes devolved into openly racist language.
For young people, these irreverent chat rooms can have a special appeal.
“This is the vernacular where their questions can be answered in the language they understand. They grew up steeped in memes and tongue-in-cheek winking behavior,” Mr Beran said. He added that such communities may appear benign at first, “but taken to an extreme, it becomes a very difficult criminal problem or a terrorist problem.”
Video game players have reportedly leaked military secrets in the past to prove their point in online arguments and convince game developers to create more accurate combat vehicles.
The New York Times reached out to wow_mao through his YouTube channel and Discord server, and in an audio call via Discord on Tuesday, he spoke at length with a New York Times reporter. He said that he spends little time on the Discord server and mainly focuses on his YouTube channel, where he has about 250,000 subscribers, as well as his social life and his university studies. He declined to share his real name for security and privacy concerns, but said he was British and Filipino.
Wow_mao is not a celebrity in the traditional sense, even among internet influencers. But despite his anonymity, his channel has gained a following over the years as his videos struck a chord with people who share his sense of humor.
He said his material grew out of an interest in geopolitics and history – “never been so interested, my God!” – and a desire to make over-the-top videos that were only funny because he “put so much effort into something so stupid”.
But he said he was bothered by the discord server’s tenor. Some “very right-wing” teens were most likely drawn to his irreverent content, he said, but he “definitely” didn’t share their worldview.
“I just released a bunch of kids,” wow_mao added. “Maybe I regret not moderating my server a little bit more.”
But that the leaked documents had turned up there, he said, was “hilarious.”
“It’s just spread to the most niche, nerdy parts of the internet,” he said. “That’s the kind of people who would find these documents — losers. That is what the US government should really be afraid of.”
Young, tech-savvy people tend to have less respect for government, wow_mao said, “and they’ll always find it funny to mock and cut below them in some way.”
In early March, a user on the wow_mao server named Lucca uploaded page after page of classified information, according to screenshots shared by users who investigated the leak. The origin of the documents was previously reported by Bellingcat.
The documents gained more attention after they were posted two days later on a server dedicated to Minecraft, where a user appeared to share them during an argument.
“Here, have some leaked documents,” the user said before uploading a few.
“Nice,” replied another user.
The posts seemed to have lingered online for nearly a month before they began to gain attention outside of Discord. Users on 4chan posted images of the documents as early as April 5. A pro-Russian channel on the Telegram messaging app shared the images later that day. Users on Twitter took notice, and so did the world.
The Discord servers and the users believed to be behind the documents were flooded with attention. A Twitter account named MrLucca, who used the same profile picture found on the Lucca Discord account, said he got the documents from yet another Discord server.
“Information found from a now-banned server and passed on,” the user wrote, according to screenshots of the conversation. The Twitter and Discord accounts have since been deleted.
For users on the wow_mao server, the attention was just a brief diversion between memes and jokes. On Easter Sunday, users mourned Lucca’s departure with a meme depicting him as Jesus rising from the tomb.
For wow_mao herself, the episode was another opportunity for content. He said the number of members on his Discord server had jumped from about 4,000 to about 7,000 before news of the documents broke.
“Any publicity is good publicity, I think, 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 donation platform popular among content creators. He then shared that video on Twitter with a message, “the CIA may have put me on their watchlist.. but I should be on yours too!”
