An Online Meme Group Is at the Center of Uproar Over Leaked Military Secrets

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.