Discord used by extremists to recruit US youth, officials warned

Application organizations of the States and Federal Acts warned earlier this year that young people risked radicalization on the Discord cat platform, according to government documents obtained by NBC News.

Two intelligence assessments of the Ministry of Internal Security and the Center for Analysis and Crime of Terrorism of Ohio (STACC) marked for distribution to the police specifically cite discord as a platform on which young Americans were exposed to extremist materials of foreign terrorist organizations. The two documents are not classified but marked “for official use only”. They were obtained by the property of the people, a pro-transparency non-profit organization that seeks and publishes government documents through requests from the Freedom of Information Act, and shared with NBC News.

It is not known to what extent the documents were widely disseminated, but the information centers on the application of laws like Stacc regularly share warnings and analyzes with other police services.

The reports, which are based on academic studies and law application data, give an overview of how managers include the risks of online radicalization. The FBI refused to comment and the Ministry of Internal Security (DHS) did not respond to a request for comments. Discord did not respond to a request for comments on documents.

Discord, which was launched in 2015 as a communication platform for players, is particularly popular with young men-a study by PEW 2023 revealed that a third of adolescents in the United States used it. Discord has already been criticized on its moderation practices. The platform allows the creation of private discussion groups on almost all subjects and has long been criticized on LAX moderation. The co-founder and former CEO of Discord, Jason Lemon, testified to the Senate judicial committee in January 2024 that Discord uses a mixture of proactive and reactive tools to apply its conditions of use and community guidelines.

A memo of the DHS of the Intelligence and Analysis Bureau, dated January 21, said that “specific discussions or an ambitious conspiracy tend to occur on discord, where the average age of members – when it is determinable – was 15 years, according to academic reports.”

In 2021, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London reflection group, found 24 discord of discord in English associated with an extreme right activity. He determined that the average age of members was 15 years old and that they sometimes discussed far -right terrorist groups such as the Neonazi division of Atomwaffen.

Suspects in several high -level mass shooting events in recent years would have used discord to announce their actions or their violent or nihilist content. In 2022, the Buffalo shooter, New York, who has since pleaded guilty to many accusations linked to the death of 10 people, seemed to have published a list of tasks for the shooting on the platform. A few months later, the man who finally pleaded guilty of having killed seven at Highland Park, Illinois, seemed to have shared violent memes.

In 2024, an Iowa school shooter who killed two people before dying of a self-inflicted ball injury had warned the discord he “prepared”.

A second document, dated April 30, produced jointly by the DHS and the Ohio Stacc, focuses on attempts at foreign terrorist organizations to radicalize minors online. The STACC website is described as the main Ohio merger center or the law sharing center. He did not respond to a request for comments.

Since August 2023, Stacc said, the United States had disrupted three plots nationwide in which minors would have shared the messaging of the Islamic State terrorist group “in online environments, including private discord cats and game platforms”.

The April memo revealed that violent domestic extremists “create and broadcast violent content on young people focused on young people”, some specifically calling for minors to commit violence before becoming legal adults.

Western countries more broadly, according to the second document, disturbed “more than 20 juvenile plots” between January and November 2024.

The documents, which mainly deal with the radicalization of young people by foreign terrorist groups, also claim that young Americans have been exposed to the content of the online Islamic State in spaces designed for minors. Adolescents “have probably become more and more sensitive to such messaging due to post-country changes in online behavior, social isolation and the increase in mental health problems,” said one of the memos.

Discord has drawn increased attention in recent weeks after the authorities said that the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk used the cat application to communicate with friends following the murder. No officials of the law enforcement suggested that the suspect has coordinated the attack with someone else.

Discord, in a statement last week, confirmed that the suspect had an account on his platform, but said that he had “no evidence that the suspect had planned this incident or promoted violence against discord”. Last week, FBI director Kash Patel said the agency was considering more than 20 people who shared a private contention channel with the suspect.

Discord does not encrypt its private channels, which means that the company has technical access to user conversations and can hand them over to the police if they are presented with an order or a mandate of the court.

However, he was repeatedly accused of lax moderation. The company has also been the subject of an in progress trial alleging that it did not do enough to stop the predators, and it was called a platform for attackers in other cases of exploitation of children. Discord said that he does not comment on legal issues and that she had increased her security practices.

The most recent discord transparency report indicated that the company had deactivated 36,966 accounts in the first half of 2024 to promote violent and graphic content or extremism. The US government asked him for information on user accounts or servers 3,782 times during this period, according to the report.