The level of abuse on YouTube, as bad as it had been, had not prepared Kapetanich for the private world of Telegram, where monkeys were known as “tree rats” and no idea for torturing them was too extreme.Īpe’s Cage contained about 400 people. “He sayang-ed Mini and then immediately smacked her!” wrote one, screen name “Grace”. It all brought Kapetanich to tears more than once. It hurt to watch as Mini’s owner cooed an Indonesian endearment - “sayang” - to her and then smacked her in the face. Lucy Kapetanich was horrified by what she saw. “Watch them try to breathe while their idiotic brains shut down,” wrote one commenter. In some, the monkeys appeared to die on screen. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a monkey more broken.”īy that point, hundreds of different YouTube channels were posting videos of baby macaques being abused. She has lived a TERRIBLE life,” someone wrote, approvingly, under a video of Mini. “Abused multiple times a week since a baby. The monkey haters in the comments loved it. Monkey Ji was known for holding her head in her hands and rocking back and forth. ![]() Some of the monkeys had developed physical tics from the stress. There was Monkey Ji, Baby Ciko, Chiro, Sweetpea, Mona - all baby long-tailed macaques being tortured on film. Kapetanich found half a dozen other monkeys on the YouTube like Mini. Gooptar already knew who she was, he said. The monkey’s name was listed in the video titles, as though she was some sort of star. One day, Kapetanich asked Gooptar about a monkey she had seen in video after video - a baby female. For now, Kapetanich knew Gooptar only as “Yardfish” and he knew her only as “Mayhem”. ![]() When she found Gooptar’s film, she messaged him, and the pair formed a kind of alliance. Kapetanich had already started her own channel, “Mad Monkey Mayhem”, to try and draw attention to the abuse. Gooptar wound up spending four months working on a one-hour video expose, titled “The YouTube Monkey Torture Ring: Part 1”, and in August 2021 he set it live. He also sometimes watched videos of baby capuchin monkeys on a farm in South Africa, and YouTube’s algorithm went to work on him too. A freelance transcriber by day, he spent some of his free time making video horror movie reviews for his small YouTube channel, called “Yardfish”. Gooptar lived 4,000 miles away from Kapetanich, in Port of Spain on the Caribbean island of Trinidad. “All it takes is like, one click and bam, it’s all over your feed,” she said. Soon, when Kapetanich looked at YouTube at night, monkeys were everywhere. Kapetanich didn’t know it then, but as she watched, YouTube’s algorithm was at work on her, following her every click, saving her every preference, presenting her with new content it hoped she would watch next. She could watch them for hours as she drifted towards sleep. Her favourites were a chimpanzee family in a zoo in Japan. The long hours on camera were taking a toll on her, so when she clicked off the webcam at night she often opened YouTube, seeking solace in cute animal videos. Her journey had begun in the pandemic, when she was doing daily webcam shows to make ends meet. For the past six months, from her small bedroom in a rundown shared house in Los Angeles, she had been slowly uncovering a global underworld of monkey torture. ![]() Kapetanich was 55 then, a former adult dancer with big green eyes and dyed-black hair that fell in curtains around her face. “I have made a complaint before,” she wrote in the little box on the screen. She typed, “Report a crime to the FBI”, into the search bar and clicked through to the agency’s online tip form. The screen lit up her tired face in the dark. One night last May, unable to sleep, Lucy Kapetanich opened her laptop in the early hours. We tested it with: Įven if we load the launchPlayer: function(videoURL) code after load: function(event) or inside it, it doesn't work.Warning: This article contains disturbing content It works with hosted MP4, but the Vimeo links like the one suggested here still don't work. Var mediaItem = new MediaItem("video", videoURL)
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