The UK Government Joins Discord: Except, Their Plan Backfires...

The UK Government has recently opened a read-only Discord server. Their plan was for the server to be a place for people to receive important announcements from His Majesty's Treasury (HM Treasury). However, they forgot to disable one key permission...

What is HM Treasury?

His Majesty's Treasury is a department of the UK Government, focused on money, spending and public budgets. They are  responsible for setting the direction of the UK's economic policy. HM Treasury is led by the Chancellor of the Exchequer - one of the most important UK Government figures and often seen as the Prime Minister's "right hand man". The current Chancellor of the Exchequer is Jeremy Hunt.

The Treasury's main role is setting the public budget for the Government, and deciding how much money is allocated towards all areas of Government, such as healthcare, education, transport, defence etc.

They are also occasionally referred to as "The Exchequer" or the more informal name of just the "Treasury".

With the downfall of Twitter potentially looming, many notable celebrities and governments have started directing users to other means of communication. The UK's HM Treasury chose Discord as their platform of choice, due to many day traders and crypto fans already using the platform.

At exactly 9:30 AM (GMT) on Tuesday 15th November 2022, HM Treasury posted this Tweet:

They had set up a Discord server, with only three channels: #welcome-to-the-server, #how-to-use-this-server and #hm-treasury-news. The only user with permissions to type is the rather fittingly named @HMTreasurySocialAdmin1#2564 - I don't think they realised you can add spaces to Discord usernames...

This user posts messages of about Tweet length in the #hm-treasury-news channel. When we scroll through these messages, we see some interesting choices of reactions...

That One Key Permission....

The admin(s) of the server - we are not sure who runs this SocialAdmin1 account: likely Treasury Staff - forgot to disable the Add Reactions permission...

Lies, Deceit, Corruption

Before we can talk about why that makes a difference, I need to give you a little backstory of the controversies and scandals of the UK Government within the last three years.

The UK Government is currently a Conservative Party Government. The Conservative Party are a right-wing political party, with their main focus being that users should fend for themselves with little government intervention.

During the Coronavirus lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, many members of the Conservative Party gathered at 10 Downing Street (the home of the Prime Minister) in London to have a "work gathering". It was not. It was a blatant cheese and wine party - violating the government's own rules that members of the public had to stay at home and not go out.

When news of these parties came to light, many people felt outrage at the government, calling people in Government at the time like Boris Johnson (Prime Minister), Matt Hancock (Health Secretary) and Rishi Sunak (Chancellor) to resign. Matt Hancock did resign when the fact he had an affair with a Parliamentary Aide surface, and Boris made his resignation in 2022 when a report told the public how he was found to be lying to Parliament and The Queen Elizabeth II - both of which are direct violations of UK Ministerial code.

There was then a leadership election where members of the Conservative Party voted Liz Truss as their leader. She was utterly useless and lasted only 45 days, and Rishi Sunak took the lead as Prime Minister.

This brings us back to the present day, and I can now tell you about the Discord server.

The Faithful Add Reactions Permission

With the mess of the economy, and the events of the last few years, many Brits have had enough of the Conservatives, and want there to be a General Election to elect another party (likely Labour; left-wing party focused on benefits) into power.

But for online trolls, where there's a will, there's a way and many people have been using the Treasury's Discord server to hurl torrents of abuse to the Government.

Although posting is limited, users can react to posts from the Treasury with emojis, and new users are cheerily announced in a “welcome” channel.

With the fact that people are welcomed, they have been changing their usernames before they join, which results in the automated welcome channel eagerly sending messages such as "Welcome, LOCK UP PRINCE ANDREW! We hope you brought pizza." and "Yay you made it, f**k_the_tories!"

Furthermore, many hundreds of users have been reacting to the posts from the Treasury, with many people co-ordinating their skills to spell out rude words, and the name of the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt. But, as this is the British, they all appear to have misspelled his surname, replacing it with a vulgarity. You can work that one out for yourself 😉...

Further reactions include middle-fingers, clowns and auberigines left, right and centre. Other users have reacted with symbols like the EU flag, the Pride Flag and a pregnant man, to show their disapproval of government policies in these areas.

If you want to see some examples of the type of reactions being added for yourself, I'm going to throw you over to the comments section of the original announcement tweet.

Moreover, users have the permissions to change their nicknames, so there is a lot of hoisting (Changing your nickname to !! for example, to appear on top of the member list). Once hoisted, users either add to their nickname or Custom Status vulgar, rude and obscene language to show their discontent for the Government.

If you want to join the server, and watch the chaos unfold (I pray for your soul if you do), you can join by using the button below.

That's all for today, hope you enjoyed today's article. Make sure to join our official Discord server to discuss your opinions on this topic further or suggest new articles!

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