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The changes garnered attention — Discord was going mainstream, tech analysts said — but they papered over the reality that the app remained vulnerable to bad actors, and a privacy-first approach left the company in the dark about much of what took place in its chatrooms.
Into that void stepped Jack Teixeira, the young Air National Guard member from Massachusetts who allegedly exploited Discord’s lack of oversight and content moderation to share top-secret intelligence documents for more than a year.
As the covid pandemic locked them down at home, Teixeira and a group of followers spent their days in a tightknit chat server that he eventually controlled. What began as a place to hang out while playing first-person-shooter games, laugh at gory videos and trade vile memes became something else entirely — the scene of one of the most damaging leaks of classified national security secrets in years.
Discord executives say no one ever reported to them that Teixeira was sharing classified material on the platform. It is not possible, added John Redgrave, Discord’s vice president of trust and safety, for the company to identify what is or isn’t classified. When Discord became aware of Teixeira’s alleged leaking, staff moved “as fast as humanly possible” to assess the scope of what had happened and identify the leaker.
But according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees, moderators and researchers, the company’s rules and culture allowed a racist and antisemitic community to flourish, giving Teixeira an audience eager for his revelations and unlikely to report his alleged lawbreaking. Discord allows anonymous users to control large swaths of its online meeting rooms with little oversight. To detect bad behavior, the company relies on largely unpaid volunteer moderators and server administrators like Teixeira to police activity, and on users themselves to report behavior that violates community guidelines.
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(Illustration by Lucy Naland/The Washington Post; Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post; Federal Bureau of Investigation; Discord screenshots; Unsplash; iStock)
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