(This post is a followup item to "Ukrainian Teen Serial Killer Gang Document Their Crimes on Cellphone Video.")
On Friday, a friend shared an item with me about a gang of teenage serial killers in the Ukraine who killed their victims basically by torturing them to death — they documented the crimes on cellphone video, and showed up to their victims funerals. Social networking websites and "shock" websites each played a role in the story, and why my friend suggested it for the blog. While the death video was part of the story, it wasn't the entire story, and it wasn't necessary to link directly to it — or watch it myself — to share what was relevant to Boing Boing about the story. So I did neither, and warned readers of that fact in the blog post. I'll repeat: There was no direct link to the "shock video" from BB at any time.
About 300 comments on that entry later, I thought it might be helpful to post a note from my friend. A number of commenters reacted to the post in a way I did not expect.
Part of why I shared this is because my friend lost a loved one to murder.
That friend's interest in this story now wasn't motivated by prurience — mine wasn't either. My friend's email continues after the jump, and I post it here not as some kind of vain validation for an editorial decision, but because I thought it was beautiful and moving.
How I encountered the story, or "Why it's not about the shock value"
– Anonymous
I am the submitter. Yesterday I was flipping around Encyclopedia Dramatica, gathering what I considered acceptable lulz from among the more horrifying articles there. Some things there are funny, some make me furious and some are just gross.
The front page randomly featured the article on the Ukranian teen serial killers, who I had not heard of, so I clicked on it. My life has been affected by murder of a loved one, and recently a sick internet "fan" detailed a lengthy fantasy of my rape and torture on their webpage, which left me feeling bad all week.
Because of these things, I was drawn to look at a story about killers even though I knew it would make me feel bad.
Filtering out the ED-style mockery of the root information, I was left surprised to read about a current teen serial killing spree of this magnitude that I had not seen mentioned in US news.
Google News had virtually nothing on it. Google Search led to lots of shock and horror sites. I decided against watching the video and actually held my hand up to block some images from view as I read some posts about the story. It was staggeringly horrible, even just to read about.
Nonetheless, it struck me as interesting that a gruesome story like this, which the US media usually covers in gory detail, was getting little media attention here, but was sort of telling itself via cellphone video and social media like forums and blogs.
The combination of "international story going untold in the US" and "criminals use cellphone cams and social networking alongside heinous crimes" made me think of Boing Boing, as a place where news breaks concerning human rights, international stories and technology. I was thinking that with great articles on steampunk teapots and unicorns, Boing Boing had also recently covered the riots in Greece and other human rights issues abroad.
I wish I had written this up when I originally sent the story in, but to be honest, I never expected so many people to immediately boil the whole thing down to a twice-removed link to the murder video. It was about the information and the story, to me. The murder video is two sites away, linked down on the bottom third of another site I linked containing the transcript.
There's no way I can imagine anyone reading the initial story, then the linked transcript, and then clicking on that video link and expecting anything other than horror. I submitted the story, and I didn't even watch it because I knew from the transcript that it would be beyond my limits.
I apologize for not starting the whole thing off with more clarity, but at heart I just wanted to present a striking story about violence, technology and information.
It was important for me to let everyone know that this story was not submitted out of a desire to revel in the video. It deeply affected me, as I'm sure it has you all. If anyone clicked, read, scrolled and clicked again to watch the video mentioned in the story, you're braver or more foolhardy than I.
I don't think she needs to apologize. Anonymous, thank you for sharing this with me, and with the world.
Previously: Ukrainian Teen Serial Killer Gang Document Their Crimes on Cellphone Video
