The current British government, now onto its third Prime Minister since 2019 and rocked by a combination of scandals and gross, malicious incompetence, is facing an uphill battle to simply avoid complete destruction at the next general election, let alone win it. What better time, then, for one of its most important ministries to launch a Discord channel to connect with the youth!
As The Guardian reports, though, the decision by the UK Treasury was immediately met with a “torrent of abuse.” And that’s despite launching as a read-only channel, meaning that while users could join and read things left by its admin, they could not type anything themselves.
If the folks responsible for setting that up thought this would guarantee some degree of protection from a public who are one more election cycle of austerity away from wheeling out guillotines, they were dead wrong: The channel forgot about emoji reactions, and so soon every post on the channel looked like this:
Over the course of the day, other popular emoji have included the clown, the middle finger, and the flags of Scotland, Ireland and Wales.
Mysteriously, a few hours after launching (and getting bullied into the sea and back), its welcome channel (which has been saying “Hi!” to account names ranging from Jeremy Corbyn to Jeffrey Epstein) disappeared and users saw their eggplant emoji vanish, suggesting that His Majesty’s Treasury were panicking and trying to engage in a little bit of emergency moderation.
Their explanation for this, though, was:
Due to the rapid growth of today’s channel which has seen over 7,000 members join, a technical difficulty has led to reactions being paused. We are working with Discord to get reactions turned back on.
I’m happy to report that at time of posting, the ability to add reactions has been restored, so if you’d like to go and leave some feedback of your own, you can do so via the link here (though sadly the admin seems to have deleted one of the emoji letters needed to complete the word “cunt” from every post, leaving everyone one character short of their preferred term for this shambles of a government).