An online meme group is at the center of uproar over leaked military secrets

SAN FRANCISCO — An online community of a few thousand subscribers that followed a YouTube celebrity named wow_mao had for years occupied a small, very male-centric corner of the internet. It was hosted on Discord, a social media app, where young people who were fans of wow_mao swapped humorous digital images and told edgy, sometimes tasteless, jokes.

Over the weekend, wow_mao's niche community became a focus of international attention after it was learned that a volunteer moderator in his Discord group had posted images of leaked documents detailing secret Pentagon intelligence.

It was all a bit much for wow_mao, who said in an interview on Tuesday that he was a 20-year-old college student who lives in Britain. In a YouTube video a day earlier, he said he was an "internet micro-celebrity, and I'd like to keep it that way."

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.

The Biden administration has scrambled to limit the damage from the leaked information, which appears to detail national security secrets concerning a range of U.S. adversaries, including Russia and China, as well as allies like Ukraine and South Korea. The FBI opened an inquiry into the leak on 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," John F. Kirby, the National Security Council spokesperson, said 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.

But the unfiltered, edgy banter in the wow_mao server, which is called the End of Wow Mao Zone, and in many other servers like it, can sometimes veer into darker territory. Those servers are sometimes described as the less venomous cousins of 4chan, the far-right anonymous message board known for sharing conspiracy theories and popularizing QAnon. Many 4chan users split their time between Discord and 4chan, sharing digital memes and chatting with friends.

Dark humor about race or ideology can eventually shape the beliefs of impressionable young people, and innocuous memes can be co-opted into symbols of hatred, 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 Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office."

An 18-year-old gunman used Discord to record his thoughts, chat with friends and share racist memes that he was collecting from 4chan before fatally shooting 10 people and injuring three others at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, last year. He was sentenced to life in prison in February.

White supremacists also used Discord to plan the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Discord has taken steps to improve its content moderation since then, writing in 2020 that it has a "responsibility to ensure that Discord is not used for hate, violence or harm."

But the site is still largely reliant on reports from users to spot problems, especially in private, invitation-only Discord servers. Discord is divided into what are essentially chat rooms, with large public groups that can have strict content moderation and smaller private ones that can have little or none at all. Discord said it was cooperating with a law enforcement investigation of the leaked documents, but declined to comment further.

In a live audio chat on the wow_mao Discord on Monday, users passed the time largely by talking about movies and complaining about their parents. But they sometimes veered into overtly racist language.

For young people, these irreverent chat rooms can hold a particular appeal.

"This is the vernacular in which their questions can be answered in the language they understand. They've grown up soaked in memes and ironic, winky behavior," Beran said. He added that such communities could seem benign at first, "but taken to its extremes, it becomes a very difficult criminal problem, or a terrorist problem."

Video game players have reportedly leaked classified military secrets in the past, to prove their point in online arguments and convince game developers to make more accurate combat vehicles.

The New York Times contacted wow_mao through his YouTube channel and the Discord server and, in an audio call made through Discord on Tuesday, he spoke at length with a Times reporter. He said that he spent little time on the Discord server and that he mostly focused on his YouTube channel, where he has about 250,000 subscribers, as well as on his social life and his college studies. He declined to share his real name out of safety and privacy concerns but said he was British and Filipino.

Wow_mao is not a celebrity in the traditional sense, or even among internet influencers. But despite his anonymity, his channel has gained a following over the years because his videos have struck a chord with people who share his sense of humor.

He said his material stemmed from an interest in geopolitics and history — "never this interested, my God!" — and a desire to make over-the-top videos that were funny solely because he "put so much effort into something so stupid."

But he said he was troubled by the tenor of the Discord server. Some "very right-leaning" teenagers were most likely attracted to his irreverent content, he said, but he "absolutely" did not share their worldview.

"I've just let a bunch of children run wild," wow_mao added. "I do regret, maybe, not moderating my server just a little bit more."

But that the leaked documents had surfaced there, he said, was "hilarious."

"It was just spread onto the nicheiest, nerdiest parts of the internet," he said. "That's the kind of people who would find these documents — losers. That's who the U.S. government really has to fear."

Young, tech-savvy people often have less respect for government, wow_mao said, "and they'll always find it funny to mock them and cut under them in some sort of way."

In early March, a user on the wow_mao server named Lucca uploaded page after page of the classified information, according to screenshots shared by users who had investigated the leak. The origins of the documents were reported earlier by Bellingcat.

The documents gained wider attention after they were posted two days later in a server dedicated to Minecraft, where one user appeared to share them during an argument.

"Here, have some leaked documents," the user said, before uploading some of them."Nice," another user replied.

The posts appeared to have lingered online for nearly a month before they started getting attention beyond Discord. Users on 4chan posted images from the documents as early as April 5. A pro-Russian channel on the messaging app Telegram shared the images later that day. Users on Twitter took notice, and so did the world.

The Discord servers and the users thought to be behind the documents were swarmed with attention. A Twitter account using the name MrLucca, who used the same profile photo that was found on the Lucca Discord account, said he had gotten the documents from yet another Discord server.

"Found some info from a now banned server and passed it on," the user wrote, according to screenshots of the conversation. The Twitter and Discord accounts have since been deleted.

To users on the wow_mao server, the attention was only a brief distraction between memes and jokes. On Easter Sunday, users mourned Lucca's departure with a meme depicting him as Jesus, rising from the grave.

For wow_mao himself, the episode was another opportunity for content. He said that the number of members in his Discord server had jumped to about 7,000 from about 4,000 before news of the documents broke.

"Any publicity's good publicity, I guess, as long as I don't land in prison," 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. Then he shared that video on Twitter with a message: "the cia may have put me on their watchlist.. but i should be on YOURS too!"

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.