In a neighborhood notorious for cutting jokes, youth culture and national defense intersected. The YouTube personality it was devoted to seems equally surprised as everyone else.
A small, primarily male-focused section of the internet was home to a few thousand-strong online community that supported the YouTube personality wow_mao. Young individuals who were admirers of wow_mao exchanged amusing digital photos and cracked edgy, occasionally tasteless jokes on the social networking platform Discord.
It was discovered over the weekend that a volunteer moderator in wow_mao’s Discord group had posted photos of leaked documents describing top-secret Pentagon intelligence, drawing attention to wow_mao’s specialized community.
The collision of internet youth culture and national security may have seemed bewildering, but it has happened with increasing frequency in recent years. And the surfacing of classified documents on Discord was a reminder of how the digital world has increasingly affected real life in sometimes dangerous ways.
“We don’t know who is behind this. We don’t know what the motive is,” John F. Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman, said on Monday. “We don’t know what else might be 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 gaining mainstream appeal during the pandemic. Much of what occurs on Discord servers — the term the company uses to describe its chat groups — is innocuous, such as music fans discussing their favorite artists and Minecraft video game players swapping memes.
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