Dozens of top secret US documents that were leaked and circulated on the Internet have now started to disappear or are at least much harder to find.
But where did they even come from?
We've compiled everything we know about how they first appeared, where they spread from, and who discussed them.
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Published documents
The first screenshots of the documents whose authenticity we were able to confirm were published on March 1.
More of them appeared a few days later.
They appeared on Discord - a social networking platform popular with gamers - and were split into several discussion channels.
Those channels are not about politics or military intelligence, they are for players of the computer game Minecraft, and another is for fans of a Filipino YouTube star.
On one of the channels, after a short discussion about Minecraft and the war in Ukraine, a user said: "Here are some leaked documents" and posted some screenshots.
One of the people in the chat group claimed that he downloaded the images from another Discord channel that has since been deleted, which is why it is impossible to confirm this now.
The investigative website Bellingkett has seen evidence that some of the documents may have been posted in January or even earlier.
These documents went largely unnoticed on Discord, before spreading to other platforms in early April and eventually being noticed by US officials and the mainstream media.
Spreading through social networks
On April 4, screenshots of the documents appeared on the boards of XNUMXchan, one of the largest and most controversial forums of the Internet subculture.
It was shared on one of the most notorious 4chan boards known as /pol/ - meaning politically incorrect - by anonymous users during a discussion about the exact number of Ukrainian and Russian casualties in the conflict.
Just a few hours later, these documents began appearing on Telegram channels close to the Kremlin, and were picked up by prominent military bloggers.
One image - widely shared on Russian channels - was altered to reduce the number of Russian troops killed and increase the number of Ukrainian casualties.
On April XNUMX, the documents were already circulating on some of the biggest social networks, such as Twitter and Reddit.
Russian reaction
At first, the Telegram channels close to the Kremlin that shared the screenshots did not dwell too much on the authenticity of the documents, focusing mainly on their content.
But soon several prominent channels and media houses began to lean towards presenting documents that were at least partially false.
An expert quoted by the ultra-nationalist news portal Regnum suggested that the documents were deliberately leaked to serve as cover for Ukraine's upcoming spring counter-offensive.
On state television, Yuri Podoljaka, a prominent war commentator, said that it was "planted information" intended to mislead Russia about the counter-offensive.
Olga Skabeyeva, host of the 60 Minutes show on Rossiya 1 television, said the West "is doing everything it can to create an image of a weak Ukraine that is running out of shells and has nothing left."
Questions about the authenticity of the documents have been raised in Ukraine as well, and some commentators have accused Russia of planting fake documents before the Ukrainian counter-offensive.
Disappearing documents
Multiple screenshots of the documents - often of poor quality - continue to circulate on Twitter, Telegram and Reddit.
But originals are much harder to find.
Many of the original copies have now disappeared from the chats where they first appeared.
Others who shared the screenshots on Discord, Telegram and Twitter either deleted their feeds or shut down their social media profiles altogether.
And there's a lot of paranoia.
One user who previously shared screenshots of documents on Discord told fellow users that he was trying to get rid of all the copies he had on his phone.
Another quickly responded to a request to share more documents on the forum with: "Nice try, FBI."
The disappearance of the original copies has fueled speculation that the Pentagon is trying to get platforms like Twitter to remove posts containing the documents.
Twitter owner Elon Musk responded by saying that he would not direct staff to actively find and remove documents.
Yeah, you can totally delete things from the Internet – that works perfectly and doesn't draw attention to whatever you were trying to hide at all
- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 7, 2023
"Oh yeah, you can totally delete stuff from the internet - it works perfectly and doesn't draw attention at all to what you tried to hide," he tweeted.
Additional reporting: Adam Robinson
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