Originally published at: Social media "vigilante" shot and killed by target | Boing Boing
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Well that seems pretty inevitable as an eventual outcome for him…
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Yeah that’s why vigilante justice is a really bad freaking idea even if one’s motivations are good (let alone when one’s motivations are driven by social media clicks).
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This is why our human trafficking and child exploitation trainings emphasize never confronting the suspect.
These people have no value for human life, and won’t hesitate to kill you or the victim, or both.
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So this guy walked up to a couple of people, punched one of them, and got shot by the other?
Am I missing anything here?
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I haven’t bothered looking into this clown, so I can’t say whether he was actually doing the Lord’s® Work or nah, but the significance of calling someone a ‘pedo’ in chan culture seems to be the jist of his grift.
At best he was a misguided dipshit. More likely just a click-chasing trolley, using the unimpeachable motivation that he’s ‘saving the children’, which no one is allowed to question, lest they be called a pedo.
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FTA:
Lee… would pose as a 15-year-old girl online to lure out and expose suspected pedophiles
Yeah a 17-year-old who chats up 15-year-olds online is not a goddamn pedophile.
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In the real world, all vigilantes are like the fake batmen at the beginning of the Dark Knight. The difference is the real world doesn’t have a real Batman. Please don’t take the law into your own hands. The amount of bad things that can happen (you getting hurt or killed, screwing up an actual criminal investigation, tipping off a bad guy and making them harder to prosecute, and worst of all, accusing an innocent person and ruining their life) overwhelmingly outweigh the good thing that can happen (bringing an actual predator to justice).
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Yeah, was thinking that. I am slightly curious as to what the laws in the state would say about an 18-to-15 or 17-15 pairing. But I also don’t want to be that guy with Curiously Comprehensive Knowledge of Age of Consent Laws either.
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The “Endless Thread” podcast has a recent episode called "The Online Legacy of ‘To Catch a Predator,’ which mostly follows a similar group and also mentions Boopac.
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40 year old pretends to be 15 years old and chats up a teenager? Teenager later defends self from 40 year old.
Who was the pedophile again?
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Someone showed me a video of these Ukrainian guys sneaking into Chernobyl and attempting to scuba dive in the containment tanks. And while I’m all for urban exploring, it reminded me of this vigilante guy, and all the video pranksters: the monetization of youtube videos puts the cart before the horse, people come up with stuff they know will go viral, and it will generate income, whether it’s wise or helpful or neither. The internet is still the wild wild west in so many ways.
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I always wondered if that To Catch A Predator show ever got punked, where someone chats up an undercover cop and gets them to meet, then they do all the set up for the sting, then the supposed perp never shows up. Had to have happened, even if they aren’t looking to punk them; I bet some perps get cold feet and decide to NOT go to the meet.
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Or getting killed and ruining their life that way.
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When I think about vigilantes, I think about what a crap job the police usually do, despite that being their job, having been given training, vast institutional support and various guard-rails having been put in place to focus them, protect the innocent and limit their abuses. A vigilante has none of those things, a disaster waiting to happen. If they’re motivated by clicks, it just compounds the disaster. Their one advantage the amateur has over the police is they can dedicate as much time as they like to a particular case - which means they can spend more time and energy worsening the problem when they get everything wrong, too - but if they’re releasing content on a punishing social-media schedule, that also guarantees they’ll be more slap-dash than the cops.
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So he posed as a 15 year old girl … and attracted a 17 year old boy, and an 18 year old.
That’s not an age difference worth getting shot over. That’s like “high school dating”.
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Something similar has happened, at least once. The guy killed himself, though.
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In retrospect, his chosen moniker was ill-omened…
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