Kidnapping, Grooming, and Suspected Cults: The Darker Side of Discord

How to solve a potentially unsolvable problem

Listen. It’s a really dark and confusing time to be alive in America.

Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, fingers are being pointed in every which direction. It was a Democrat! It was a Republican! It was a Groyper! It was some trans person! It was some trans person’s partner! It was some trans person’s partner inspired by a playlist of trans musicians! It was Twitch streamer Hasan Piker! And, according to Candace Owens, it was Israel!

There’s still not nearly enough information out there to fully unpack this situation, but there has been an interesting curiosity in the story that not only ties this all together… it ties it together with a number of other recent shootings in America. And so, I don’t want to talk about Charlie Kirk right now…

Let’s talk about Discord.

You see, on September 15, The Washington Post broke the news that Kirk murder suspect Tyler Robinson had confessed to his friends over Discord that he did it. “Hey guys, I have bad news for you all,” said a message from his account. “It was me at UVU yesterday. im sorry for all of this.” Suspicion has run rampant in the week since Kirk’s slaying on the role Discord played in all of this. Was the slaying planned on Discord? Were there co-conspirators? TMZ obtained a statement from Discord that found there was “no evidence that the suspect planned this incident or promoted violence on Discord.”

The Kirk slaying being planned on Discord, or not, isn’t really the point, though. Because for some reason, Discord finds itself to be one of the more prominent youth-oriented platforms around that fosters an unsafe environment for kids. A Statista report monitoring the first half of 2024 found Discord taking action on over two MILLION distinct accounts for reports of “exploitative and unsolicited content.” 800 thousand accounts had action taken on them for reported “regulated or illegal activities…” and 350 thousand were due to child safety reasons.

What is it about Discord in particular that pulls in these kinds of actionable numbers? Why does it matter? And what can be done to stop it?

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WHAT IS DISCORD?

Now, it’s probably important to mention that I don’t use Discord myself. But Jed does, especially whenever he has to research anything related to internet communities. If you’re like me, maybe you thought Discord was just another social media app, and in some ways it is. Jed says that Discord is a lot like mIRC from the old days of the internet: a chat program full of thousands, maybe even millions, of servers or chatrooms. A place where, to enter any “server,” you explicitly need to be invited into it.

But for the rest of you who weren’t using the internet in the 90s and 2000s like Jed was, Discord is defined on Wikipedia as “an instant messaging and VoIP social platform that allows communication through voice calls, video calls, text messaging, and media,” where “communication can be private or take place in virtual communities called "servers".” In 2024, Discord was said to have 150 million monthly active users, 19 million weekly active servers, and was used mostly by gamers - making it the 30th most visited website on Earth.

If you work a professional white collar job, do you know what Slack is? In a way, Discord is like a less professional Slack with more features, though Jed used Discord as a primary means of communication at his old college job. You’ll find communities all over Discord for either broad or niche topics. You can find a community there with fans of creators like hBomberguy or Dean Withers; you can get your sneaky snark on on servers like Gossip Gate. You into crypto? They got you covered. There are even a number of niche groups for fans of TV shows like Survivor.

This is the symbol for a “Doggo Paradise” Discord Server. Neat!

But then there’s the darker side of Discord.

The New York Times reported back in 2017 that the Unite the Right rally, a white nationalist rally that led to the death of Heather Heyer, was planned on Discord on servers with names like “National Socialist Army” and “Führer’s Gas Chamber.” In 2019, members of the US Armed Forces were revealed to have been members of a white nationalist Discord server known as Identity Evropa. In 2023, NBC News personally identified around 200 prosecutions alone surrounding the transmission or receiving of CSAM via Discord, as well as the use of the platform to extort children to send sexually graphic images of themselves - aka sextortion.

I mean, you can throw a stone and hit a random story of harm being committed on Discord. Even aside from the Statista report, you have cybertip.ca finding a 284% surge of reported online violence on Discord. Intel 471 wrote a report detailing how Discord is both a hub for hackers AND a target for hackers, with easily spread malware crippling countless computers in seconds for hapless users. Things are so bad on Discord that if you search for Discord on YouTube, the top results are likely to be video essays about “the dark side of Discord.” “The darkest servers on Discord.” “When Being a Discord Freak Ruins Your Life.” And yes - videos discussing Tyler Robinson’s alleged use of Discord for the murder of Charlie Kirk.

But why is it so bad on Discord? The friendly answer is it’s because the biggest perk of Discord is also its biggest downfall: it’s a private place full of even smaller private places. But the blunt answer is that Discord is DESIGNED to be impenetrable. As written for CNN back in 2022:

“The service, which is known for its video game communities, is also less intuitive for some parents, blending the feel of early AOL chat rooms or work chat app Slack with the chaotic, personalized world of MySpace. While much of the focus from lawmakers with other platforms has been on scrutinizing more sophisticated technologies like algorithms, which can surface potentially harmful content to younger users, parents’ concerns about Discord recall an earlier era of the internet: anonymous chat rooms.

Some, like a room for memes, can have hundreds of thousands of members. But the vast majority are private, invite-only spaces with fewer than 10 people, according to Discord. All servers are private by default, and only channels with more than 200 members are discoverable in its search tool if the administrator wants it to be public, the company added.

Still, it’s possible for minors to connect with people they don’t know on public servers or in private chats if the stranger was invited by someone else in the room or if the channel link is dropped into a public group that the user accessed. By default, all users – including users ages 13 to 17 – can receive friend invitations from anyone in the same server, which then opens up the ability for them to send private messages.”

Basically: Discord is impenetrable for the uninitiated. But due to its privacy, it creates an entirely foreign set of obstacles for parents to even protect their kids or for adults to even protect themselves in many cases. It also makes it one of the perfect places to organize and plan crimes. I can tell you right now that even with the right amount of research, I very likely could not investigate a server on Discord if I needed to. With most servers being invite-only, Discord occupies a seemingly impossible amount of the internet that many of us will never and could never see.

Which is made all the more disturbing when you hear about something like 764.

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What is 764?

In 2024, The Washington Post, Wired Magazine, Der Spiegel in Germany, and Recorder in Romania conducted an international investigation into a group that the FBI considers a domestic terror cell known as 764. Named after the area code of its teenage founder Bradley Chance Cadenhead, who was 15 then and 18-19 now, 764 has become something incredibly insidious and sadly underdiscussed.

This is going to sound a lot like Satanic Panic fan fiction and pearl clutching, but 764 has documented links to a Satanic Neo-Nazi collective known as the Order of Nine Angles and can best be described as a digital sextortion network. I called them a group above, but even that can be misleading; 764 is decentralized, meaning the original 764 group is just one of many offshoots that focus on “terror, abuse, and the deliberate targeting of children,” according to The Department of Justice.

Within the international investigation, there are stories of 14-year-old girls being groomed into sending nude photos that soon became “leverage” for more depraved acts, such as live streaming her carving 764 screennames into her thigh, drinking from a toilet bowl, or even cutting the head off her hamster. All of this finally culminated in her being pressured into ending her own life on a live stream to her “friends” on the 764 Discord server.

“The perpetrators — identified by authorities as boys and men as old as mid-40s — seek out children with mental health issues and blackmail them into hurting themselves on camera, the examination found,” The Post writes. “They belong to a set of evolving online groups, some of which have thousands of members, that often splinter and take on new names but have overlapping membership and use the same tactics. Unlike many “sextortion” schemes that seek money or increasingly graphic images, these perpetrators are chasing notoriety in a community that glorifies cruelty, victims and law enforcement officials say.”

To put it another way, Stephenville Police Capt. Jeremy Lanier in Texas, where 764 was founded, once said of 764, in six years of investigating CSAM cases, he’d “never seen anything as dark as this. Not even close.”

Pam Bondi and the Department of Justice staged a sting operation and managed to arrest two “leaders” of 764 Inferno back in April. This followed the 2021 of Cadenhead, who was tried as a minor and sentenced to 80 years in prison for extensive quantities of CSAM. Back then, 764 was widely considered to have dissolved with his arrest. But his arrest only made it worse. Now, there are groups with names like 764 Inferno, CVLT, Harm Nation, Leak Society, H3ll, and, previously, No Lives Matter, just to name a few.

In just a few years, crimes associated with 764 and its offshoots have kept law enforcement busy all over the world. You’ve likely heard of a few of these. Focusing on 2025 alone, we had the first major school shooting of Trump 2.0. Solomon Henderson, the 17-year-old shooter at Antioch High in Nashville, live streamed his murder of one teen girl and injuries of two other students before he ended his own life. His manifesto later revealed that he was a “Groyper Incel,” a term you might now known refers to fans of neo-Nazi streamer Nick Fuentes, who claimed “the west has fallen…billions must die,” before writing that the book is “dedicated to Accelerationism,” a theory that calls “for a drastic increase in and expansion of capitalistic growth and technological development to hasten an inevitable collapse of the status quo.”

Or as Henderson wrote: “burn[ing] this entire world to the ground and rebuild from the beginning.”

Henderson’s manifesto, apart from its blatant anti-semitism and racism, also contained specific references to 764 and the Order of Nine Angles. And, as you’ll see in some of the other stories… explicit references to gaming and niche online memes:

“Henderson appears entrenched in online “meme” (i.e., jokes) culture, especially the unmoderated 4chan forums rife with hatred and bigotry, which he claims he first heard of at nine years old, but does not use the forum as much anymore. He used terms such as “our guys,” which signifies that a user adheres to a community’s core beliefs and values, taking “pills” to “accept” the world around you, a reference to The Matrix trilogy, where the terms “blue pill” and “red pill” originate, and commonly used by white supremacists to denote their beliefs, and using online terms like “-maxxing,” which means working or doing something at its maximum level. He also makes references to “A10,” a term that became popular with the surge of “Aryan Classic” memes, which signifies someone being a true Aryan. Henderson, when talking about his “thoughts on black people,” invokes a copypasta (i.e., a block of text circulated online through the copy and paste functions) which references several ways that Black people should be killed, including “roundhouse kick a ni**** into the concrete,” “exterminate ni****s in the gas chamber,” and “stab[bing] pregnant black baby ni****s.””

Henderson’s manifesto, which was called an “obvious troll” by Candace Owens, is said to have plagiarized OTHER far-right manifestos and claims that Mr. Beast, Hasan Piker, Turkey Tom, iDubbbz, and yes, Candace Owens, influenced him to kill. It is a really bizarre read and really… incomprehensible. But the references to 764 and O9A aren’t the first time, and they won’t be the last time, that the group was affiliated with a major crime.

Ah yes, the radicalizing influence of the Feastables guy

The Institute for Strategic Design writes about the 2024 arrest of a man named Kyle Spitze, who “highlighted the traumatic circumstances and upbringings of some members.” According to ISD, Spitze (username ‘criminal’) would send a video around on Discord servers in 2023 of his mom’s boyfriend shooting him, as well as a video of his mom’s own dead body following a drug overdose. Spitze was a member of the Harm Nation faction, and was arrested for creating self-harm videos of minors, as well as CSAM… including that of a 12-year-old.

In February 2025, self-identified 764 member Jairo Jaime Tinajero pleaded guilty to a racketeering conspiracy, online enticement, three counts of production of child sexual abuse material, three counts of distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), five counts of interstate communications of threats, cyberstalking, and conspiracy to murder a girl in aid of racketeering. That last murder is chillingly recounted in the criminal complaint as Tinajero murdering a girl, and then plotting to dispose of her body with a co-conspirator over Telegram, another messaging app used by 764, in a vat of acid. According to ABC News, “When he pleaded guilty to conspiracy and child pornography charges… Tinajero said he believed the murder would raise his stature within the 764 network.”

Unconfirmed, but still worth mentioning, are some suspected connections between recent shootings in America and 764. Most prominently, Robin Westman, the Minneapolis Catholic School shooter, had “764 - O9A” scrawled on their weapon, and unverified reports claimed Westman spent time on 764 Discord servers. We’re not 100% sure of Westman’s affiliation with the group, but they were at the very least aware of it.

What makes 764 all the more disturbing as a group isn’t just its presence on Discord. According to Anapol Weiss, they also have members seeking children on… Roblox. Yeah. Roblox is back on UTDN, unfortunately.

“On Roblox, predators have been known to lure children via in-game chat, grooming them under the guise of friendship or shared gaming interests,” they write. “Some abusers create custom games or avatars that subtly mimic 764 symbolism to identify fellow group members or prey on vulnerable players.”

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CONCLUSION

Earlier this year, ABC News reported that there are over 250 investigations across the country, in all 55 field offices, looking into 764. It’s estimated that there are thousands of victims as young as nine years old across the world. 764 are perhaps the most sinister group on Discord, but as we wrote above, Discord itself has a rampant problem with exploitation of all kinds even without their influence.

However, it’s important to remember that Discord serves a vital purpose for establishing a community online. Its privacy features, which we’ve highlighted the sinister side of, can also limit harassment and brigading from bad actors when servers are well-moderated. Jed visits Gossip Gate daily, because he’s a sneaky little gossip, to read the tea on his favorite (and also least-favorite) influencers, but many go on there simply to chat with their best friends, play a video game, or discuss TV shows. In the case of Dean Withers’ Discord, there are a number of well-moderated Debate channels for his fans to have healthy debates on topics ranging from gun control to Palestine.

And notably, Discord can function as Ground Zero for modern historical events. When Nepal’s anti-government Gen Z protests resulted in the destruction of Parliament and the overthrowing of its government, elections were held for an Interim Prime Minister ON Discord. And back in 2023, Discord was used to publish classified United States documents via the Minecraft Discord server involving the Russo-Ukrainian War, among other things.

Much like the issues we outlined with Roblox last week, Discord’s biggest problem overall is a lack of proper age verification. Discord allows users as young as 13, yet all it takes to sign up for a Discord account is… workable fingers or thumbs. No, really: it asks you your age. You type it. Boom. This, and a poorly implemented “Safe Messaging” feature for minors, resulted in a lawsuit courtesy of New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin, who alleged Discord misleads parents about its safety features.

“Discord markets itself as a safe space for children, despite being fully aware that the application’s misleading safety settings and lax oversight has made it a prime hunting ground for online predators seeking easy access to children,” Platkin wrote in the suit. “These deceptive claims regarding its safety settings have allowed Discord to attract a growing number of children to use its application, where they are at risk.”

Ultimately, Discord needs stricter age verification and a stronger dedication to keeping its servers safe. This is nothing new for Discord; Discord has an often-updated article on their website detailing how they work with law enforcement for investigations into their platform. And their “Privacy & Safety” page is consistently updated with new ways they are making the platform safer. As of recent, they claim “friend servers” do the following:

• “Responds to and investigates user reports about violations of our universal Community Guidelines.”

• “Scans for known malware and spam.”

• “Scans all files for Child Sexual Abuse Material and immediately reports any content and perpetrators to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the United States, which works with local law enforcement to take appropriate action. “

• Provides users and administrators with tools, including optional filters, to help them avoid unwanted content and undesirable behavior.

Yet with over 250 investigations across America alone into 764, who operate primarily ON Discord, these efforts simply aren’t enough. Discord should not go away. But there needs to be some kind of overhaul, or at least enhancement, of their moderation system to help prevent the rampant radicalization, exploitation, and abuse of children, and in some cases adults, occurring in private servers across Discord.

That being said: I don’t even use Discord, so what do you think? What can be done to fix Discord? Is the problem more with Discord itself or are the users getting smarter at bypassing already solid moderation? Write me what you think down below!