The military has had a foot in the games, especially as a recruiting tool with efforts like the United States Army series of the early 2000s. The army’s gaming arm returned to public attention this week, after that the US Army esports account tweeted “UwU” in response to a tweet from the Discord chat app.
The tweet went viral, with many criticizing the military’s use of the e-sports initiative as a recruiting tool to attack youth. Naturally, hilarity ensued. The team was not kidding.
uwu pwease enwist and commit waw cwimes uwu
– Jay is antifascist, he lives in favor of blacks (@shutupfish) June 30, 2020
Soon, a new speedrun challenge was generated on Twitter where users competed to be kicked out of the US Army esports Discord server as quickly as possible, Polygon reported. The server was flooded with users who posted in an effort to try to be banned, while some posted the classic text “copypasta”, others simply linked to the Wikipedia page for “United States War Crimes”.
Most of the videos showed users achieving bans in 20 seconds, with the modifications clearly active to keep up with the influx of new users.
The main functionality of the Discord channel has now been disabled. While it is still possible to join the server, reacting to the rules message no longer grants access to the main chat channels, although the number of reactions continues to increase as users try to join.
According to Polygon, the Discord channel was originally disabled with a message from a moderator named “UwU” that said “Temporarily disabled. Thanks for the fun tonight! That message was later replaced with a read.” Have a little more patience. while we finish some backend stuff on the server to make it a nice place for everyone to play. We apologize for the inconvenience to those who legitimately want to join us. Trolls do fun things for everyone! “
As of this writing, the last message in Discord’s welcome channel simply says “This page is intentionally disabled …”
