(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The 20-year-old man who allegedly tried to assassinate presidential frontrunner Donald Trump reportedly had an account with Discord—a chatting app used by feds, intelligence contractors and an assortment of bad actors to target gamers.
The Associated Press reported Monday that the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, appears to have had an account, but rarely used it—and didn’t use it at all in the last several months. A Discord spokesperson told the AP there’s “no evidence” that Crooks used his account to promote violence or discuss his political views.
Discord is reportedly cooperating with the FBI’s investigation.
Discord and Mass Shootings
The social media platform has a history of being linked to shootings and terrorism.
Perhaps the most notorious example of this is the 2022 Buffalo massacre. In that case, shooter Payton Gendron was active on Discord in the leadup to his killing spree. Even more bizarrely, Gendron had been chatting on Discord with a “retired federal agent” moments before he killed 10 people at the Buffalo supermarket.
Last April, the FBI denied Headline USA’s request for records on the retired federal agent’s links to Gendron, citing an ongoing investigation.
More recently, mass shooter Dylan Butler—who reportedly killed a sixth grader, injured four others and fatally shot himself at a school January in Iowa—was also reported to have used Discord.
NBC reported days after the shooting that Butler was a member of a Discord chat group called “School Massacres Discussion,” which was dedicated to discussing school shootings. According to NBC, another Discord user had notified the FBI about the chatroom months before the attack.
“The Discord user said they had flagged the chatroom to the FBI in November, after which an FBI agent reached out over email and asked for more information,” NBC reported in January.
“The user emailed the FBI agent screenshots of the server but did not hear back. The user said their report to the FBI did not include mention of the user ‘took2much.’ The chatroom was closed before the shooting.”
Along with mass shootings, Discord is notorious for hosting chatrooms that promote Satanism, pedophilia and terrorism. Members of the Satanic cult 764, for instance, operate on numerous Discord channels.
Discord and the War on Gamers
Discord was thrust into the national spotlight in April 2023, when it was revealed that a Massachusetts Air National Guardsman had allegedly leaked highly sensitive Pentagon documents on the platform.
Since then, the Biden administration has been pushing to eliminate all gamer privacy on Discord and similar chat apps.
Indeed, NBC News reported in April 2023 that the Biden White House is “looking at expanding the universe of online sites that intelligence agencies and law enforcement authorities track.”
Around that same time last year, investigative reporter Lee Fang also published a story about how the U.S. government is partnering with private intelligence firms to spy on gaming chatrooms—revealing that the online spooks are particularly interested in conducting surveillance on teenagers.
Fang quoted an unnamed official from the Israeli threat intelligence firm CyberInt, who said: “I prefer to detect threat actors when they’re young or starting out at 14 or 15. That’s when I start observing and documenting their malicious activities. Because when they’re at that age or stage in their career, they’re a lot more careless and open. They tend to show off more.”
The latest information on the government’s targeting of gamers came in February, when the Government Accountability Office reported that the FBI increased its efforts last year to infiltrate gaming servers.
“Officials said in 2023, the FBI worked to increase engagement with gaming and gaming-adjacent companies for the annual meeting and on outreach efforts with the program manager,” the GAO report said.
“Officials said that as the FBI works with more companies, it continues to learn how companies operate, the type of behavior and content companies see on their platforms, and the extent to which companies report information as tips.”
That same GAO report also implausibly alleged that the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill uprising was planned on gaming platforms—even though the Justice Department hasn’t revealed any evidence of that.
“For example, according to a National Fusion Center Association official, social media users plotting the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol used code words for weapons, so they could covertly discuss plans to bring weapons to the Capitol,” the report said, failing to provide evidence for its claim.
But while the Biden administration is pushing for more access to gaming chatrooms in the name of public safety, past history has shown that it’s the FBI’s own contractors who are committing the crimes on Discord.
That was demonstrated last August, when the DOJ announced child porn charges against a former FBI contractor. According to the DOJ, Virginia man Brett Janes, 26, contacted roughly a dozen minor boys over Discord and Snapchat.
According to an FBI affidavit, Janes’s crimes were discovered by the father of one of the victims. The father contacted local police, who then relayed the case to the FBI around April 2023. A month later, the FBI confirmed that Janes was a contractor within a headquarters unit in the bureau.
Regardless of the government’s intentions, privacy advocates have warned against the government’s push to spy on gamers.
“There’s a disturbing trend toward government agencies contracting out surveillance, paying the likes of data brokers to spy on people even when agents wouldn’t be allowed to,” Sean Vitka, senior policy counsel of Demand Progress, told Fang last year.
“It’s becoming frighteningly apparent that a similar privatized spying cottage industry targeting private chat rooms also exists.”
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
