Part 2 of 2
How Discord became a breeding ground for extremistshttps://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/12/12/discord-app-extremism/Beginning in 2020, Teixeira and his friends had littered several private servers, including Thug Shaker Central, with racist and antisemitic posts, gore and imagery from terrorist attacks — all in apparent violation of Discord’s community guidelines. The server name itself was a reference to a racist meme taken from gay porn. Though his intentions weren’t always clear, in chats Teixeira discussed committing acts of violence, fantasizing about blowing up his school and rigging a vehicle from which to shoot people.
Members of Thug Shaker Central also shared memes riffing on the live stream footage of the Christchurch mass killing, which Tarrant had littered with far-right online references aimed at gaming communities.
A user on the server who went by the handle “Memenicer” said he would discuss “accelerationist rhetoric” and “racial ideology” with Teixeira, pushing to see how far the conversation would go. On the wall of Teixeira’s room hung the flag of Rhodesia, a racist minority-ruled former state in southern Africa that has become a totem among white nationalists.
After Teixeira’s arrest, FBI agents visited Memenicer, who spoke on the condition that he be identified by his online handle, carrying transcripts of chats the two had exchanged, he said.
“One was about a school shooting and then one was … about a mass shooting,” he said. More often the server was a stream of slurs: “the n-word over and over again.”
In Thug Shaker Central, Teixeira cultivated a cadre of younger users, who he wanted to be “prepared” for action against a government he worked for but claimed to distrust. Over time, the community became “more extreme,” according to Pucki, a user who created the initial server used by the group during pandemic lockdowns in 2020 and spoke on the condition that he be identified by his online handle.
Once he became administrator of the server, Teixeira expelled those he didn’t like, narrowing the pool of who could report him. Many of those who remained had spent time on 4chan’s firearms board and its notorious racism and sexism-filled /pol/ forum, Pucki said, bringing the toxic language and memes from those communities.
Teixeira’s political and social views increasingly infected the server, said members of Thug Shaker Central. “It became less about playing games and chatting and having fun, and it became about screaming racial slurs,” said Pucki.
There was at least one self described neo-Nazi on Thug Shaker Central: a teenager who went by the handle “Crow” and who said she dated Teixeira until early 2022. Crow said that at the time she was involved with more hardcore accelerationist white supremacist groups that sought to inspire racial revolution, movements she says she has since left behind and disavows.
Crow spent time on Telegram, but she also pushed her views on Discord, including in Thug Shaker Central, where several members recalled her sharing links to other communities and posting racist material, including swastikas.
“I was trying to radicalize people at the time,” said Crow. “I was trying to get them to join … get them more violent.”
Crow claimed that a young man she attempted to radicalize later live-streamed the beating of a Black man in a Discord private message as she and another person watched. The Post was unable to confirm the existence of this video.
“The man was sitting against a wall and he was kicking him,” Crow said. She had little fear the video broadcast in a group chat would be picked up by the company. “They, as far as I know, can’t really look into those.”
Teixeira posted videos taken behind his mother and stepfather’s house, firing guns into the woods. Filmed from Teixeira’s perspective, the clips mimicked the aesthetic of first-person-shooter video games — the look of Tarrant’s live stream in Christchurch.
“That’s what I think of instantly,” said Mariana Olaizola, a policy adviser on technology and law at the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights who wrote a May report on extremism in gaming communities. “I’m not sure about other people, but the resemblance is very obvious, I would say.”
Another video Teixeira posted on the server showed him standing in camouflage fatigues at a gun range near his home. “Jews scam, n----rs rape, and I mag dump,” he says to the camera before firing the full magazine downrange.
Discord’s Redgrave confirmed that the video violated the company’s community guidelines. But like everything else that happened on Thug Shaker Central, no one at Discord saw it.
The intelligence horde linked to Teixeira turned out to be larger than it first appeared, extending to hundreds of documents posted online, either as text or images, for more than a year.
Redgrave said there was little the company could do about the platform being used to share government secrets.
“Without knowing what is and is not classified and without having some way to essentially detect that proactively, we can’t say definitively where classified documents go,” said Redgrave. “That’s true of every single tech company, not just us.”
Although staff spotted potentially classified material circulating online, including on 4chan, as early as April 4, they didn’t connect it to Discord until journalists started contacting the company on April 7, said Redgrave.
When Teixeira frantically shuttered Thug Shaker Central on April 7, the company was left without an archive of content to review or provide to the FBI, which made its first request to Discord the same day.
Despite its history of apparent policy violations, Thug Shaker Central was never flagged to the trust and safety team. “No users at all reported anything about this to us,” said Redgrave. “He had deleted TSC before Discord became aware of it,” he added. “These deletions are why, at the time, we were unable to review it completely for all content that would have violated our policies.”
A review of search warrant applications issued to Discord since 2022 found that law enforcement agencies were generally aware of the company’s limited retention policies, which they noted typically rendered deleted data tied to suspects unrecoverable.
“I don’t think any platform is ever going to catch everything,” said Katherine Keneally, head of threat analysis and prevention at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, and a former researcher with the New York City Police Department. But a “data retention change,” she said, “would probably be a good start in ensuring at least that there is some accountability.”
In the days after Thug Shaker Central was brought to Discord’s attention, the company sifted through traces of the server captured only in fragments of metadata, according to company representatives. It leaned heavily on direct messages, screenshots and press reports to piece together what had happened. By the time Teixeira was arrested on April 13, The Post had already obtained hundreds of images of classified documents shared online but about which Discord said it had no original record.
According to court records, FBI investigators found that Teixeira had been sharing classified information on at least three, separate Discord servers.
One of those spaces was a server associated with the popular YouTuber Abinavski, who gained a following for his humorous edits of the military game “War Thunder.” Moderators on the server, Abinavski’s Exclusion Zone, watched in disbelief, then bewilderment, as Teixeira began uploading typed intelligence updates around the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He organized them in a thread, essentially another channel within the server, that was dedicated to the war. Teixeira posted intelligence for more than a year, first as text then full photographs, at times catering intelligence to particular members in other countries.
An April 5, 2022, update was representative. “We’ll start off with casualty assessment,” it begins, before listing Russian and Ukrainian personnel losses, followed by what are presumably classified assessments of equipment losses on both sides. The next paragraph contains a detailed summary of Ukrainian weapons stores along with a brief on Russian operational constraints.
“Being able to see it immediately was just very fascinating and a little bit exhilarating,” said Jeremiah, one of the server’s young moderators, who agreed to an interview on the condition that he would be identified only by his first name. “Which again, in hindsight is completely the wrong move, it should have been immediately reporting him, but it was very interesting.”
An Air Force inspector general’s report, released on Monday, found that Teixeira’s superiors at Otis Air National Guard Base inside Joint Base Cape Cod failed to take sufficient action when he was caught accessing classified information inappropriately on as many as four occasions. If members of his unit had acted sooner, the report found, Teixeira’s “unauthorized and unlawful disclosures” could have been reduced by “several months.”
The thread used by Teixeira disappeared sometime around a March 19 post he made indicating he would cease updates, according to Jeremiah and three other users on the server. Redgrave said that like Thug Shaker Central, Discord had no record of “reports or flags related to classified material” on Abinavski’s Exclusion Zone before April 7. It wasn’t until April 24 — 11 days after Teixeira’s arrest and more than two weeks after the FBI’s first contact with Discord — that an alert from the company popped up in Jeremiah’s and other moderators’ direct messages.
“Your account is receiving this notice due to involvement with managing or moderating a server that violates our Community Guidelines,” read the note from Discord’s Trust and Safety team. The message instructed moderators to “remove said content and report it as necessary.” It was the first and last communication he received from Discord.
“It was a completely automated message,” said Jeremiah, who spoke to The Post in Flagstaff, Ariz., where he lives. “None of us have had any contact with any Discord staff whatsoever, that’s just not how they handle things like this.”
Like other moderators on Abinavski’s Exclusion Zone, Jeremiah had largely fallen into his role of periodically booting or policing troublemakers. He had no training. He summarized Discord’s moderation policy as “see no evil, hear no evil.”
“They pretty much pass off all blame onto us, which is how their moderation works, since it’s all self moderated,” said Jeremiah. “It gives them the ability to go, ‘Oh, well, we didn’t know about it. We don’t constantly monitor everyone, it’s on them for not reporting it.’”
In October, Discord announced several new features for young users, including automatic blurring of potentially sensitive media and safety alerts when minors are contacted by users for the first time. It also said it was relaxing punishments for users who run afoul of the platform’s Community Guidelines.
Under the old system, accounts found to have repeatedly violated Discord’s guidelines would face permanent suspension. That step will now be reserved for accounts that engage in the “most severe harms,” like sharing child sexual exploitation or encouraging violence. Users who violate less severe policies will be met with warnings detailing their violations, and in some cases, temporary bans lasting up to one year.
“We’ve found that if someone knows exactly how they broke the rules, it gives them a chance to reflect and change their behavior, helping keep Discord safer,” the platform said in a blog post, describing the new system.
“The whole warning system rings to me like Discord trying to have its cake and eat it too,” said Berge, the media scholar. “It can give the pretense of stepping up and ‘taking action’ by handing out warnings, while the actual labor of moderation, muting, banning and resolving issues will ultimately fall on the shoulders of admins and moderators.”
“It’s a big messaging shift from a year or two ago when Discord was avidly trying to distance itself from its toxic history,” she said.
Researchers like Berge and Olaizola continue to find extremist servers within Discord. In November, The Post reviewed more than a half dozen servers on Discord, discoverable through links on the open web, which featured swastikas and other Nazi iconography, videos of beheadings and gore, and bots that counted the number of times users used the n-word. The company has also struggled to stem child exploitation on the platform.
Users in one server recently reviewed by The Post asked for feedback on their edits of the Christchurch shooting video, set to songs including Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now.”
Another clip on the server, which had been online for more than six months, included a portion of Gendron’s live stream broadcast from the Buffalo supermarket where he shot and killed 10 Black people.
In a statement issued after Teixeira’s arrest, Discord said that the trust and safety staff had banned users, deleted content that contravened the platform’s terms and warned others who “continue to share the materials in question.”
“This was a problematic pocket on our service,” said Redgrave, adding that seven members of Thug Shaker Central had been banned. “Problematic pockets are something that we’re constantly evolving our approach to figure out how to identify. We don’t want these people on Discord.”
More than a dozen Thug Shaker Central users now reside on a Discord server where the community once led by Teixeira has been resuscitated — absent their jailed friend. The Post reviewed chats in the server. Members discuss his case and complain about press coverage, expressing the desire to “expose” Post reporters.
“Don’t read their zog tales,” one user wrote on June 4, using an abbreviation for “Zionist Occupied Government,” a baseless antisemitic conspiracy theory.
Another user wrote on Sept. 10 that their lawyer had suggested they stop using racist slurs.
“(I won’t stop),” the user added.
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