The tweet went viral, with lots of criticizing the armys use of the esports effort as a recruitment tool to target young people. Naturally, hilarity took place. The group was not in on the joke.
The armed force has long had a foot in gaming, most significantly as a recruitment tool with efforts like the early 2000s Americas Army series. The armys gaming arm came back into the public eye this week, after the U.S. Armys esports account tweeted “UwU” in action to a tweet by chat app Discord.
uwu pwease enwist and commit waw cwimes uwu– jay is antifascist, pro-Black lives (@shutupfish) June 30, 2020
Soon, a new speedrun obstacle generated on Twitter where users contended to get banned from the United States Army esports Discord server the fastest, Polygon reported. The server was flooded with users publishing in an effort to get and try prohibited– while some posted classic “copypasta” text, others simply connected to the Wikipedia page for “United States war criminal activities.”
The majority of videos revealed users achieving restrictions within 20 seconds, with the mods clearly active to keep up with the increase of brand-new users.
The main functionality of the Discord channel has actually now been handicapped. While its still possible to sign up with the server, reacting to the rules message no longer grants access to the primary chat channels– though the number of reactions continues to tick up as users attempt to join.
According to Polygon, the Discord channel was originally disabled with a message by a mediator called “UwU” reading “Temporarily handicapped. Thanks for the enjoyable tonight!” That message was later replaced with one reading “Have a bit more perseverance while we complete some back end things in the server in order to make it an enjoyable location for you all to game. We ask forgiveness for the inconvenience to those that are legitimate wishing to join us. Giants make things enjoyable for everybody!”
As at the time of composing, the most recent message in the Discords welcome channel simply reads “This page is deliberately disabled …”.
The tweet went viral, with many slamming the armys usage of the esports effort as a recruitment tool to target young people. According to Polygon, the Discord channel was originally disabled with a message by a mediator called “UwU” checking out “Temporarily disabled. That message was later on replaced with one reading “Have a bit more persistence while we finalize some back end stuff in the server in order to make it an enjoyable place for you all to game.