Nooooot super comfortable with the kiwifarms links.<p>It's kind of weird to read an article warning about people who obsessively consume and produce torture content, and find out the article promotes a community that obsessively consumes and produces stalking/doxxing content.<p>Don't get me wrong, vigilantes are better than serial killers. But kiwifarms doesn't have a reputation for being selective in its targets. I think they're fundamentally caught in the same trap of chasing highs as the people the article describes.
The really disturbing part of this whole issue is the way that online platforms perform a form of torture arbitrage between buyers in wealthy countries that have stricter animal cruelty laws and suppliers in countries that lack them. The platforms are fully aware at this point, but seem to rely on the grey areas of free speech and multinationalism. In my opinion, it calls for some kind of third party independent review system since the platforms remain complicit and have an obvious conflict of interest in giving up ad revenue and highly engaged users.
I realize this isn’t something people want to think about, but that’s precisely why these people are doing what they do unchecked. The most surprising thing about this is that the people generally are living pretty normal lives and those close to them don’t know that they are running this industry
Warning: disturbing content.<p>I'm not sure it belongs on HN, but I'm also reluctant to flag it, because it is well-written and interesting.<p>Thankfully, the number of online accounts involved appears to be minuscule (assuming the author is credible).
While the article is interesting, I think it fails to defend its own thesis.<p>While animal cruelty is a component of the Macdonald Triad (along with arson and bedwetting) which supposedly indicates sociopathy (the rigor of the triad as a predictive tool has been seriously questioned) I don't think there's much evidence that the zoosadists consuming this content are would be serial killers. The profile of the average consumer given, of largely middle aged and older women, is also very much not the profile of serial killers, usually men that begin killing in their late 20s-early 30s.<p>And though the article does make an argument for a link between zoosadism and pedophilia, serial killers are not statistically more likely to be pedophiles than other men. John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer both targeted teenage boys but they're arguably famous because of how abnormal this is/was among serial killers.