- Olga Robinson – Shaian Sardarizadeh – Jake Horton
- BBC News
A US Pentagon official announced that the leaked documents are authentic
Dozens of classified US documents that were leaked and circulated online are disappearing, or at least becoming harder to find. But where did those documents come from in the first place?
We’ve pieced together what we know about how these documents first appeared, where they spread, and who was discussing them.
Post documents
The first screenshots of these documents were verified to have been published on March 1. Then more of them appeared a few days later.
It has been featured on Discord, a social media platform popular with computer gamers, and has been shared on many discussion channels.
These channels are not related to politics or military intelligence, they are for players of the computer game Minecraft and for fans of Filipino celebrities on YouTube.
On one channel, after a brief discussion about Minecraft and the war in Ukraine, the user says “Here, we have some leaked documents,” and posts several screenshots of them.
Someone in the chat group claims to have taken the photos from another Discord channel, which has since been deleted, making it impossible to verify.
Investigative website Bellingcat spotted evidence that some of the documents may have been released in January or even earlier.
The documents remained largely undetected on Discord, before spreading to other platforms in early April, eventually being picked up by US officials and the mainstream press.
Spread through social media
On April 5, further screenshots of the documents appeared on the message board 4chan, one of the Internet subculture’s largest and most controversial hubs.
Anonymous users posted the documents on one of the most popular 4chan boards known as /pol/, during a discussion about the exact number of Ukrainian and Russian casualties during the current war.
Just a few hours later, these documents began appearing on pro-Kremlin Telegram channels, and were also picked up and reposted by prominent military bloggers.
One of the photos, which was widely circulated by Russian channels, was edited and modified to reduce the death toll of the Russian forces and exaggerate the Ukrainian losses.
By April 7, the documents had also been circulating on some major social media platforms, such as Twitter and Reddit.
Russian response
Initially, the pro-Kremlin Telegram channels that shared screenshots of the documents did not focus on the authenticity of the documents, but rather on their content.
However, many prominent channels and media soon began to tend to portray the documents as fake, even at least partially.
The Regnum news website quoted an expert as saying that the documents may be a deliberate leak intended to provide a camouflage cover for the expected Ukrainian counterattack in the near future.
As Yuriy Podolyaka, a prominent war commentator on Russian state TV, said, this is “planted information” intended to mislead Russia about the counterattack.
Olga Skabaeva, host of the 60 Minutes show on state TV Russia 1, said the West was doing “everything it can to create an image of a weak Ukraine that is running out of shells and has absolutely nothing left”.
Questions have been raised about the authenticity of the documents in Ukraine as well, with some commentators accusing Russia of planting fake documents ahead of the Ukrainian counterattack.
Hidden documents
Multiple screenshots of the documents – often of poor quality – are still circulating on Twitter, Telegram and Reddit.
But the originals are hard to find. A lot of the originals are now gone from the chats where they first appeared.
Others who shared screenshots of the documents on Discord, Telegram and Twitter either erased what they had written about them or deleted their social media profiles altogether.
There is a great deal of paranoia too.
One user, who previously shared screenshots of the documents on Discord, told fellow users that they were trying to get rid of all copies on their phones.
Another quickly responded to an invitation to share more documents in the forum with the phrase, “Good attempt, the FBI (indicating that the American bureau is trying to catch those who publish documents).”
The disappearance of the originals has fueled speculation that the Pentagon was trying to get platforms like Twitter to remove posts containing the documents.
Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, responded by saying that he would not instruct his employees to search for and remove the documents.
Musk tweeted: “Yes, you can completely delete stuff from the internet, it works perfectly and doesn’t draw attention at all to anything you were trying to hide.”
