Global network of sadistic monkey torture exposed by BBC | Hacker News Reader

Global network of sadistic monkey torture exposed by BBC

bbc.co.uk

34 pointsmellosouls32 comments

Animal abuse videos are hard to watch. Easily some of the worst things I've seen online. I really wonder what/where the appeal is. I imagine that people who "enjoy" that kind of content are basically one step removed from being serial killers, but I have a feeling that the reality is a lot more complex than my imagination. I hope that the people busted for commissioning/paying for monkey torture videos aren't just locked up and ignored. They should still be locked up, but we should try to get them help and use the opportunity to learn as much as we can about them because they aren't the only ones out there, and they won't be the last.

No mention of K*w*f*r*s of course, even though they already had a thread dedicated to exposing these zoosadists for a long time. But it's good that mainstream news is finally reporting on this.

KF also doxxed and swatted a lot of other people. Of the 3 people who committed suicide in no small part because of KF, how many tortured animals?

No idea who KF is/are, but I f the answer is 3, does it shift your feelings about their actions? What about if the question is not how many tortured, but how many paid to enable or otherwise actively incentivized torture?

My wife wrote about this on her Substack and got into the Kiwi stuff, if you're curious: https://meghanboilard.substack.com/p/the-online-business-of-...

The tech angle here is unsurprising, but yet another example of "the algorithm" causing real harm

Tech companies can't scream "it's too hard". Tech employees can't hide their actions behind "If I didn't do it someone else would".

From the longer article at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/Iot1dIWVS5/hunting-the-monk...

> Then the algorithm served her videos of monkeys being slapped and sprayed with water. These videos violated YouTube’s terms of service, so she reported them, but the platform didn’t seem to take any action. The videos kept appearing. Kapetanich kept clicking. Soon enough, a torture video turned up in her feed.

Lock them up. What the hell. Can someone with a background in psychology please explain why the hell there are people interested in this? Is this clinical sadism? I don’t see how we, or they, are given an evolutionary advantage by being like this. Is it a result of upbringing/life? This is horrible. (I’m aware there’s a literal genocide of chickens and pigs and cows daily but at least there’s a purpose other than deriving pleasure from another’s suffering.)

Presumably they all lead strange and traumatic lives that lead them to having radically different desires and values. Eg, they interviewed a previously incarcerated former gang member who said they felt it was as ethical as their previous drug dealing - presumably there's truth to that, but it's a view that's necessarily developed from a dark place.

I'd like to caution you that trying to use evolutionary psychology to understand the existence of evil in the world is a path to madness. Kindness and empathy are an evolutionary advantage, our success as a species is predicated on our cooperation and mutual understanding.

But that doesn't tell you very much about individual people. Most adults in my country are taller than 5 feet/1.5 meters, but I've met a couple adults that were 4 feet/1.2 meters tall. Outliers exist, and with 8 billion people, there are quite a few of them.

I think we often feel a temptation to frame evil stuff in a larger context to make it feel smaller and more manageable and explicable. But we can get ourselves into a lot of trouble with narratives like that. Evolutionary psychology in particular is really easy to misuse, it readily leads to some prejudicial or racist lines of reasoning if you aren't very careful about how you define "fitness".

tl;dr version, as reported by Fox News: Scientist Proves Shorter Adults in [Country] are Evil!

Taking out your frustrations on other things/people is calming in a way.

For example, I keep getting these tele marketing calls to take a new credit card or personal loan very frequently. I'm talking once a day. Also lately I've been having a very frustrating time at work. So a couple of days back, when I picked up such a call, initially I just told the person on the other end that I am currently unemployed and don't want to take a new loan. When the marketer persisted, I just let loose on them hurling all sort of abuses. I've always known that these people are low level and are under tremendous pressure to make new sales. But whatever, letting go at this person made me feel great.

To be honest, given the context I know I had little justification for my action, but shouting and cursing this person still felt great. I think it's similar for these people. The difference is they need even less justification to behave in even more extreme ways.

I guess most people might be similar at a psychological level, it's just some of them behave in more extreme ways than others or need less stimulus to behave in a certain way.

> why the hell there are people interested in this? Is this clinical sadism? I don’t see how we, or they, are given an evolutionary advantage by being like this.

Some people are doing this for a living. See Guantanamo Bay.

I shouldn't have clicked on this first thing in the morning. There goes my day.

Is there the equivalent of the using kittens as eye bleach, but for ideas?

This isn't surprising. Torturing small animals for own enjoyment is a known behavior of humans. It's only reasonable that some of them are satisfied just by looking at it, not necessarily doing it.

What other "known behaviours" are there that must be going on in private groups then?

It's not surprising maybe, but it's reasonable to expect people to be appalled. Psychologically healthy people don't, I think, spend much time thinking about all the things which would disgust them but are undoubtedly occuring all the time in the world around them.

Torturing small animals isn't something a healthy adult enjoys. These people are damaged or sick. I suppose it isn't surprising that such people exist but it is surprising they are able to form a network like this.

These groups exist on instagram, facebook, and presumably google. How is it possible that with all the surveillance that we hear about on these web properties that we don't hear about busts on these groups?

And google profiting from this torture? Is that surprising?

> It's only reasonable that some of them are satisfied just by looking at it, not necessarily doing it.

I'd like to know how often that's true, and how often they escalate to killing animals/people. If you're right and some percentage of them will always be content with watching someone else torture animals, I wonder if they could get the same satisfaction from high quality fakes, because if so then having realistic but fake animal torture videos available online could mean preventing the torture of actual animals.

Why do such people exist? I would put them all in labor camps until death.

I had a downstairs neighbor who tied a tiny dog to the fence by the leash, half hanging it by the neck each time. This guy would then proceed to light an enormous BBQ fire and blaze a half dozen burgers like it's a flambé chef show on a full-size charcoal grill on an 7x7' patio where the flames were over a meter high, almost burning the place down next to the wooden fence and the wood of the my patio overhanging. That was between screaming racial epithets at the TV or passers by like he's some cartoon caricature, screaming at his wife, screaming at his kid, and threatening anyone who he crossed paths with. Some people are just asking for karma to knock on their doors.

...and the latest entry in "sentences I wasn't expecting"

wait till you find out how polio vaccines were made...

For those who don't want to bother; monkeys were infected with polio, killed, and their spines ground up to make the first batches of the vaccine. Aside from being infected with polio and euthanized, there didn't seem to be any effort to make the monkeys suffer more than necessary. This is a false equivalence.

Sounds more like an alchemical procedure than what I would've expected from "modern Western science", tbh.

If you eat meat, think twice about having a strong reaction to this article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com