Predator-hunter videos take an enduring social-media trend—performing stunts for clout—and add a dash of vigilante justice and participatory true crime.
A couple of years ago, when Cam, her husband, and her brother-in-law would sit around watching YouTube, a certain kind of video kept popping up. The videos, which were made by groups like Dads Against Predators, the Predator Catchers Alliance, or the Alabama Predator Poachers, tend to follow a similar template, opening with screenshots of flirty messages exchanged between an adult man and someone purporting to be a teen-age girl or boy, set to an ominous soundtrack.
In the past few years, they have become a minor YouTube phenomenon, one of the platform’s proliferating subgenres that can feel ubiquitous in some parts of the online universe yet invisible in others. They typically follow the formula made famous by the TV segment “To Catch a Predator” in the early two-thousands, but with a more chaotic, D.I.Y. energy. The most popular examples have hundreds of thousands of views, and have inspired people to bring the trend to their own town.
Although there were only twenty episodes of the series, in three years, it’s “this touchstone that I grew up with and that millions of people grew up with,” Paul Renfro, a professor of history at Florida State University and the author of “,” said. “It shaped how people think about sexual violence in ways that we haven’t fully grappled with.” The show focussed on the threat from strangers on the Internet, even though most victims of child sexual abuse are harmed by someone known to them.
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