In the age of the internet, big data can push you everything you want to see, or it can accidentally plunge you into another dark world that you never envisioned.
Lucy, 55, is a former dancer living in a run-down share house in Los Angeles.
During the epidemic, she relied on YouTube to do online live broadcasts and video programs to subsidize her family. The long shooting made her exhausted, so every day after the shooting, she would brush some cute animal videos on the video website to heal herself.
Lucy's favorite thing to see is the chimpanzee family at the Japanese zoo. She can watch for hours until she goes to sleep.
YouTube's big data is based on Lucy's preferences, and constantly recommends other videos about baby monkeys and little gorillas.
However, the video content quickly became strange. At first, Lucy is pushed a circus-like video, and the little monkey who is forced to wear human clothes performs various flower tasks under the command of the owner.
Then, her homepage showed the little monkey being roughly slapped and splashed with water.
Lucy decisively reported the videos, but similar content kept popping up in front of her eyes. It wasn't long before she saw the unbelievable animal abuse video.
The videographer, who appears to be Indonesian, tortures a small long-tailed monkey in every way possible, while the comments section applauds and even asks bloggers to shoot more videos. Because the report was not followed by YouTube, Lucy made a series of videos attacking and exposing the abusers' behavior.
In Trinidad and Tobago, 6,500 kilometers from Los Angeles, Dave also swiped out horror videos that were inappropriate to describe.
He is a stenographer and blogger on YouTube, and in his spare time enjoys watching baby capuchin monkeys on a farm in South Africa. Like Lucy, big data led him step by step to the channel where monkey abuse enthusiasts gathered.
They saw at least six or seven baby long-tailed monkeys being tortured and abused in various accounts, and some monkeys were so frightened that they had body convulsions and shaking their heads with their hands. There is a fairly active account in this area, and the protagonist is a little monkey named mini.
It is often caught by the tail in the video, slammed hard against the wall, and when the baby monkey screams in pain, there is a high-pitched laugh from the other end of the camera.
Exhausted from the beating, Mini had nowhere to hide, its hands only grasping the sides of its body. The owner of the mini often slaps it while lovingly calling it "baby" in Indonesian. Such videos break Dave's heart.
However, the viewers of the video were excited about the suffering of the little monkeys. One person commented: "Awesome, I've never seen a monkey worse than it!" Another commented, "You see, they're breathing desperately, but their stupid brains are dead." ”
Dave spent four months gathering evidence about the abusers and posting it on YouTube, but the attention was low, but the video was seen by Lucy, who was also concerned about the matter.
They soon became netizens, and after communicating with each other, they learned that there was a group of people in the world who hated monkeys very much and took pleasure in watching monkeys being tortured, while another group of people specially provided them with monkey abuse videos to profit from it.
Nina, a 42-year-old animal activist, has discovered a monkey abuse chain that is darker than YouTube. She followed YouTube's monkey abuse video and came across a Telegram community called "Million Tears," where people share videos that are countless times crazier than on YouTube.
Live baby monkeys were amputated, beheaded, drowned. Nina wrote a press release, which did not cause any splashes, but made the owner of the "million tears" frightened and disbanded the group.
Lucy and Dave immediately got in touch with Nina when they saw the manuscript. In this way, Lucy, Dave, Nina, and a group of British journalists who are also investigating the underground monkey abuse industry form an alliance, and they intend to reach out to this group and find a way to arrest these animal abusers.
Although "Million Tears" disbanded, it soon became popular in this deformed circle - "Ape Cage".
Unlike "Million Tears", this is a more private group, and outsiders are completely unable to enter. Lucy and others wrote a report letter to the FBI, hoping that they would intervene in the investigation, but they never replied.
Just as the investigation reached an impasse, on January 22, 2022, a man named McDonald emailed Lucy.
MacDonald's real name is actually McCartney, a 48-year-old man. He said he is not a bad person, now has a wife and a 19-year-old daughter, and has a cat and dog at home. His online name in the monkey abuse group is "King of Torture" and has a certain reputation in the organization.
He said that out of guilt, he no longer wanted to participate in the monkey abuse activities, and hoped to take Lucy and his group into this secret dark web as a spy, so that they could expose the evil behavior of the organization and destroy the organization.
Lucy registered her screen name to enter the "Cage of the Ape" as he said. There are about 400 members in the group, some of whom are not normal at first glance, and what is even more terrifying is that others are so "normal" that if they encounter them in reality, they will never believe that they have this abnormal proclivity.
For example, a man named "Bones" is a former U.S. Air Force pilot, and another named "Trevor" is said to work in nuclear energy and can only appear at night. One of the leaders of the group, the person with the screen name "sadist", is a waiter at a gas station in Alabama, USA, and is the kind grandmother of several children
There were also Europeans and Australians in the group, one of whom was called "Incinerator", who often posted very extreme monkey abuse videos, but this person was actually a birdwatcher.
During the contact with the organization, Lucy also learned more about McCartney. He was a former motorbike mob in Virginia, with a bunch of tattoos including swastikas, a Southern flag at home, and a drug overdose that left his teeth missing. He went to prison and lived a relatively ordinary life after he got out.
McCartney stumbled upon monkey abuse during the pandemic. The protagonist of the first video he watched was Mini. In that video, mini was fooled by the owner, he thought it was funny, so he subscribed to more related content, and was pulled into the monkey abuse group.
From time to time, the group will hold polls, such as "What tool do you want to use to abuse monkeys?" A hammer B pliers C screwdriver", he voted for these as jokes, but he did not expect that soon a group of members sent out a video of abusing monkeys with corresponding tools and shared them with everyone.
Conversations between "Mr. Ape", "King of Torture" and "Sadism"
McCartney felt that there was a business opportunity in this matter, so he collected various monkey abuse videos from YouTube and sold them to friends in the "Ape Cage". As he collected and sold more and more videos, he became a respected figure in the group. This allowed McCartney to regain the sense of respect he had when he was a gangster.
But he's not the boss of the organization yet. The group's sole leader, codenamed "Mr. Ape," spends hours a day discussing his monkey-abusive fantasies with his friends and sharing the latest monkey abuse videos.
He also manages a large number of similar monkey abuse groups, and he even has an organization called the "Secret Monkey Discipline Academy", which is specially used to find ghosts in the organization in order to kick out animal protection people like Lucy in time.
Mr. Ape would contact the monkey keepers in Indonesia and ask them to abuse the baby monkeys as described by the group and pay the fee on a per-use basis.
At first, Little Monkey Mini was an absolute "star" in their circle, and even Mr. Ape wanted to buy it for $5,000 and then make a video sawing it in half to fulfill his long-standing fantasy. But mini's Indonesian owner is not stupid, and sells monkeys to them to die, that is, killing chickens for eggs. It is better to stay in your own hands and slowly abuse to earn more.
Gradually, the group of friends also got tired of mini, they only hope that it will be killed one day, and expect more violent people to shoot more exciting videos for them.
The aforementioned "sadist" found another anonymous Indonesian, who dared to shoot no matter how violent the video, such as a monkey being dismembered by a power tool or even poured with sulfuric acid, charging $200 per video.
As a result, the "sadist" customized countless monkey abuse videos from this person, and soon became the most contributor in the group.
"Sadist" and Mr. Ape even discussed the more frenzied idea of putting the baby monkey in the blender. This idea was frantically supported by the crowd. The "sadist" immediately told the Indonesians about the shooting requirements and placed an order.
Although normal people simply can't imagine it, the video of the blender was filmed and quite popular in the circle.
While the "sadist" was immersed in the process of being worshipped as a god by his friends, Mr. Ape sold the "sadist".
Mr. Ape tells Lucy and his group the true identity of the "sadist". In an unexpected twist, Mr. Ape tells Nina, an activist who acts with Lucy, that she, like McCartney, is also an undercover agent and lurks inside in order to bring down the organization from within.
However, Nina did not believe his statement at all. Because this person has an unconcealable joy and pride every time he talks about monkey abuse, Nina believes that Mr. Ape may have learned from some channels that the organization is being investigated, and he thinks that he is inevitable as the leader, so he wants to pretend to be a good person so that he can get a reduced or light sentence in the future, and even get rid of the crime.
Although they knew that his motives were impure, Lucy and his group still wanted to get more useful information from his mouth.
They learned that Mr. Ape was a college student in his early 20s who lived at his mother's house in Florida. His family looks pretty good, with the grave of his deceased pet cat in his backyard.
He was tall and wore glasses, and the room was lined with childhood toys and pictures of his late father. No one would believe that such a man has hundreds of monkey-abusing videos on his computer, as well as a folder dedicated to documenting monkey-abusing fantasies.
However, even Mr. Ape (whose name is said by British journalists to be unrecognizable) does not know who the Indonesian photographers they regularly contact are. After shooting so many cruel videos, I have never been arrested, and it is also because these people are very careful, never show their faces, do not say their real names, and the shooting environment is mostly indistinguishable wilderness.
Dave does not believe in evil and looks for clues from the monkey abuse video little by little. He found that Indonesians filming for "sadism" always wore four wooden bracelets, and in one video, he saw a motorcycle parked in a corner, and fortunately, the license plate number was clearly captured.
With the help of a team of journalists, it became known that the license plate belonged to a man in the Ciamis Regency region of West Java, and that the license plate was registered near a long-tailed monkey colony.
Dave then searched Facebook for the man's name. He found a homepage featuring Indonesian men wearing four wooden bracelets and a red electric drill that had appeared in monkey abuse videos behind him — and right!
British journalists contacted animal groups in Indonesia, who contacted the police to arrest the man, Asep Yadi Nurul Hikmah.
When police caught a man holding boxes of baby monkeys at a local market, he also found the horror blender that appeared in the video in his home.
Ironically, torturing a long-tailed monkey is not too much of a crime in Indonesia, as the long-tailed monkey is not a protected animal.
The man is valued because he is also engaged in the crime of reselling rare species. Hikmah, who mutilated animals by inhuman means, was sentenced to only three years in prison, with most of the sentence coming from scalping, not animal cruelty.
At the same time that the police arrested the Indonesian man, the police in the Central Java region also received news of the operation, and they were going to arrest another video shooter, the owner of the little monkey mini.
The man, M Ajis Rasajana, is in the second-hand clothing business and lives with his wife and children in a nicely decorated two-story building.
During the interrogation, he told the police that at first he just posted some ordinary monkey videos, but he did not expect it to be very popular. He noticed that when he abused and beat the monkeys, the number of views was exceptionally high, and in order to make more money, he kept shooting monkey abuse videos and registered a Telegram account.
Rasajana holds the mini
Before Mini became a monkey "star", 20 monkeys had died at his hands. Because of his high popularity, Mini has always been abused by him and not tortured to death, so that the poor little monkey has been tortured inhumanly since he was a few days old and has become his cash cow.
Rasajana herself felt that Westerners who liked to watch monkey abuse had a brain disease, but for the sake of money he did what they said. The money he earned by abusing the mini was enough for him to buy a new car. Rasajana was sentenced to only eight months in prison.
The investigation of those involved in the case on the American side proceeded more slowly. The FBI did not reply, and eventually it was a Department of Homeland Security agent who usually takes care of child abuse cases, and after reading the case file, he was shocked to find that the monkey abuse and child abuse industry chain works in almost the same way.
With the help of Lucy's group, the agent first tracked down the "sadist" account, and the money transactions with group friends and video shooters were clearly visible in the account.
The agents found that these American monkey abuse enthusiasts were not so much stupid as extremely arrogant. They trade using their real names and addresses, and often discuss their children, work and where they live in groups.
They thought they would never be found, they thought they could swagger without legal responsibility, but they were wrong.
The first to be arrested was McCartney, who although he was remorseful for his actions and offered to help Lucy's group, but this did not change the fact that he distributed hundreds of monkey abuse videos and made huge profits from the dissemination of animal abuse videos.
The next police target was "sadism." Unlike McCartney, she did not admit her guilt at all, until agents pulled up more than 100 monkey abuse videos from her phone and reluctantly confessed.
Finally, the police also arrested Mr. Ape, who is the most difficult and antisocial of all.
No matter how long the police or activists talked to him or how they used, he didn't tell the truth and didn't admit that he really liked monkey abuse. He insisted that he accidentally got too deep into the drama in order to catch people involved in monkey abuse, but psychologists assessed that these were lies.
In the United States, possession of videos of animal cruelty is not illegal, but the maximum sentence for distributing videos is up to 7 years in prison, and now that the three are still awaiting prosecution, prosecutors are confident that they can be convicted.
Although the masterminds of the "Cage of the Ape" were all arrested, the war did not end. Dave and Lucy are still investigating the true identities of the other participants, and Nina sues YouTuber for turning a blind eye to animal cruelty and faces a lengthy legal battle (the videos are still not cleaned up by YouTube).
Perhaps the only good news is that the little monkey mini, who has been repeatedly abused, has been rescued. It was rescued with a broken tail and jaw, all of its baby teeth broken or missing, and severe stress.
After four months of recuperation at the protection base, Mini has improved significantly, and now has made many friends of the same kind, and soon she will be able to return to her home in the Great Forest without worrying about being beaten by her owner.
Lucy told Dave the latest news from Mini, and the two burst into tears with excitement. Dave asked Lucy, "What would you most like to do if one day, we arrested all the monkey abusers, and no one in the world abused monkeys, no longer spread this kind of video?"
Lucy replied that she would pour a glass of tequila on the hard drive she carried with her full of video evidence of abuse, and then smash it, destroy the thing filled with the worst images in the world, and never face it again.
But they know that this is a difficult and long ideal ....