The FBI has identified 20-year old Thomas Matthew Crooks as the suspect involved in the failed assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania yesterday. Following the incident, there’s been a rush to identify any online accounts that may have been associated with the alleged gunman and might explain his motivations. Discord now tells Kotaku that it has found an account on the gaming chat platform that appears to be associated with Crooks, but that he rarely used it.
“We have identified an account that appears to be linked to the suspect; it was rarely utilized and we have found no evidence that it was used to plan this incident or discuss his political views,” a spokesperson for the company wrote in an emailed statement. “Discord strongly condemns violence of any kind, including political violence, and we will continue to coordinate closely with law enforcement.”
Primarily used for gaming communities and to chat while playing online, Discord differs from public social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Unlike those, Discord is a server-based messaging system where users gather in siloed communities that aren’t easily searched or shared outside of an individual servers’ active members, especially if people are using a private server to communicate.
That was the case with the gunman behind the 2022 mass shooting in Buffalo that left 10 dead. Planning for the attack took place on a private Discord server for months before it was carried out, at which time the platform was also used to share links to livestream of the massacre on Twitch. Both platforms were criticized at the time by New York’s Attorney General and others for not doing enough to monitor exchanges for potential threats.
While promoting itself as a more mainstream communication tool for broader applications during the pandemic, Discord has since doubled-down on its roots as a gamer-centric platform. “We believe Discord can play a uniquely important role in the future of gaming,” CEO Jason Citron wrote in a blog post earlier this year. “We’re going to focus on making it easier and more fun for people to talk and hang out before, during, and after playing — and we’ll help developers of those games bring their creativity to life.
The July 13 shooting at Trump’s Butler, PA campaign rally left the 2024 Republican presidential candidate injured in his right ear and resulted in the death of both an attendee in the stands and the suspected gunman. Two other attendees were injured and remain in critical condition at Alleghany General Hospital.
The Intercept reported that Crooks made a $15 donation to the liberal PAC ActBlue in 2021 on President Biden’s inauguration day but voter status records showed he registered as a Republican after turning 18 later that year. He was also seemingly wearing a shirt for the gun enthusiast YouTuber channel DemolitionRanch during the shooting. “Last night was crazy…” the channel’s author, Matt Carriker, tweeted today. “I’ve got news stations calling me asking if I ever spoke with the shooter… what… the… hell.”
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