An online community of a few thousand subscribers that followed a YouTube celebrity named wow_mao had for years occupied a small, very male-centric corner of the internet. It was hosted on Discord, a social media app, where young people who were fans of wow_mao swapped humorous digital images and told edgy, sometimes tasteless, jokes.Over the weekend, wow_mao’s niche community became a focus of international attention after it was learned that a volunteer moderator in his Discord group had posted images of leaked documents detailing secret Pentagon intelligence.It was all a bit much for wow_mao, who said in an interview on Tuesday that he was a 20-year-old college student who lives in Britain. In a YouTube video a day earlier, he said he was an “internet micro-cele …
