When I learned that top-secret US military information was leaked from the Discord server, I reacted like many gamers do.here we go again. This happens all the time on the War Thunder forums.
But these leaks were a little more sensitive than those: Washington Post (opens in new tab), the documents contained U.S. information about the war in Ukraine, details about U.S. efforts to spy on allies, and more. Mainstream newspapers are now racing to cover all the details of this massive event and its global implications, and the Massachusetts Air National Guard suspected of posting the documents to his Discord server has been sentenced to a possible 15 years in prison. There is a nature.
It’s very serious, but yesterday I couldn’t help but laugh when I saw the article “FBI Arrests Leader of Online Group Where Secrets Revealed”. new york times (opens in new tab)“Online group leader?” You mean the Discord admin you used to show off to your Arma buddies?
That’s not to say the Times didn’t get it.The mainstream reports I’ve seen do a pretty good job of contextualizing Discord and gaming connections for a wide audience.The Washington Post , labeled that article “The Discord Leaks” and may have overemphasized the chat app from my perspective, but it makes sense. For most people, a chat group where gamers played his Project Zomboid and posted racist memes might come as a bit of a surprise. It wasn’t WikiLeaks or anything like that, it was the source of a world-changing information leak.
But it sounds right to us, doesn’t it? This isn’t the first time Discord, the application people use to talk to their Minecraft friends, has taken a leading role in an event of global impact. Discord temporarily banned his WallStreetBets server for “hate speech” during the meme-investing hoopla that brought down GameStop’s shorts. Before that, reports of white supremacist groups organized on a Discord server prompted the company to work with the Southern Poverty Law Center for that purpose. Efforts to remove them.
In South Korea, the shock of the 2020s Nth room case (opens in new tab) Although mostly played on the encrypted chat service Telegram, discord (opens in new tab)— Chat rooms on the platform were used to coordinate and disseminate sexual threats. There was a call for content moderation.
On Discord and elsewhere, gaming is intertwined with political reaction groups, instances of violence (swatting as another example), scams (most recently of the NFT variety), illegal gambling and match-fixing, and organized harassment. And now, especially this week, the information is leaking.
I won’t go into all the implications of this new normal, but I’ll point out one thing I noticed this week. It’s that the entanglement between the game and this kind of world happenings has led to a fairly accurate intuitive understanding of what’s going on. when everyone didn’t. For example, a week ago An unnamed U.S. official reportedly (opens in new tab) Russian finger.And just before the identity of the leaker was revealed, Microsoft president Brad Smith answered the question (opens in new tab) about the incident, referring to “basically the efforts of the Russians to infiltrate the gaming community” that can be used to distribute information.
“So basically I know it was Russian. [who leaked the documents]?” the interviewer asked Smith.
“I wouldn’t do more than I did here,” said Smith. It’s a good place for them to circulate information, and eventually journalists will find it. “
But it was not “Russian”. It wasn’t even the Snowden-esque whistleblower that was expected in the 2010s. In the headline of , we joked: ‘I can’t believe this is going on’
That’s the 2020s for you. Hedge funds won’t be taken down by a thrilling corporate espionage campaign. Hedge funds are taken down by Reddit guys posting Pepe the frog memes. Cold War movies are not suitable subjects for political intrigue. Discord admin drama if you want to understand what’s going on in the world today.
