Quieting Discord: A new frontier in military leaks and extremism
By Nikki Wentling
Wednesday, Jul 10, 2024
(Aaron Provost for Military Times)
During a five-month period from 2022 to 2023, Massachusetts Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira sent 40,000 messages on the online chat platform Discord, some of which contained classified national security secrets.
An FBI investigation revealed that Teixeira, a 22-year-old who ran a server on Discord called “Thug Shaker Central,” spent much of his life online, talking primarily with other young men via message, video calls and voice chats. He chatted about guns and military gear, threatened his school, made racist and antisemitic jokes, traded conspiracy theories, discussed antigovernment sentiments, and in a bid to show off, shared some of the military’s most closely guarded secrets about the Russia-Ukraine war and the Middle East.
By the time the young airman was arrested in 2023, media scholar PS Berge had been studying Discord and its users for three years and had created an online consortium of other academic researchers who were doing the same. That an intelligence leak occurred on the site, creating a national security incident, didn’t come as a shock to her.
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-military/2024/07/10/quieting-discord-a-new-frontier-in-military-leaks-and-extremism/
