In the past two days I’ve read a couple of really disturbing stories about what can only be described as evil people doing evil things. One of the stories involves children and the other one involves monkeys. But despite that difference what is striking is how much they have in common. The core of that commonality is the internet’s ability to bring people together around a shared interest. Often that’s a good thing or at least a harmless one. If people to gather around their love of music or movies or woodworking or any number of other interests, there is probably a dedicated forum for that full of people sharing tips and photos.

But in some cases the shared interest isn’t good or even neutral. In some cases it’s the sexual abuse of children or pure sadism toward animals. Thanks to the internet, the sickos eventually find one another and find children to exploit.

Discord launched in 2015 and quickly emerged as a hub for online gamers, growing through the pandemic to become a destination for communities devoted to topics as varied as crypto trading, YouTube gossip and K-pop. It’s now used by 150 million people worldwide.

But the app has a darker side. In hidden communities and chat rooms, adults have used the platform to groom children before abducting them, trade child sexual exploitation material (CSAM) and extort minors whom they trick into sending nude images…

In March, a teen was taken across state lines, raped and found locked in a backyard shed, according to police, after she was groomed on Discord for months. In another, a 22-year-old man kidnapped a 12-year-old after meeting her in a video game and grooming her on Discord, according to prosecutors.

NBC News identified an additional 165 cases, including four crime rings, in which adults were prosecuted for transmitting or receiving CSAM via Discord or for allegedly using the platform to extort children into sending sexually graphic images of themselves, also known as sextortion.

The point isn’t that Discord is unique but it definitely has seen a huge increase in reports about such behavior. Then again, the problem seems to be getting worse everywhere.

According to an analysis of reports made to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), reports of CSAM on Discord increased by 474% from 2021 to 2022…

According to both NCMEC and C3P, reports of enticement, luring and grooming, where adults are communicating directly with children, are increasing across the internet. Shehan said enticement reports made to NCMEC had nearly doubled from 2021 to 2022.

As disturbing as that is, it’s not as disturbing as this BBC story about an even smaller niche of sickos who formed a community (on YouTube at first and later on another site) for people who like to see baby monkeys tortured. This details of this article are repulsive so I won’t go into that (and please don’t read the story unless you’re prepared for that) but what’s really amazing about the story is that many of the movers and shakers in the group, people who were crowdfunding money to pay people in Indonesia to make the videos, have been identified in the real world by name. There are photos of them in the story.

One was a former biker gang member living in Norfolk, VA who spent time in prison and later joined this group as “The Torture King.” Another was a “a 46-year-old grandmother who worked at a gas station and lived with her son in a solitary trailer set back from the road in a rural part of Alabama.” He screenname was “Sadistic.” And the ringleader of this lovely group, which had at least 400 people, was a guy living in his mother’s house in Florida.

It turned out Mr Ape was running his empire from his mother’s house in Florida, in a nice neighbourhood with broad streets lined by picket fences and neatly-kept lawns. He was a college graduate in his mid-twenties, tall — basketball player tall — with a beard, baggy clothes and glasses. In the backyard of his house, a large oak tree shaded a cat graveyard where six cats were buried under six miniature cat headstones. Upstairs, his bedroom was a time-capsule of childhood: toys, a single bed with patterned bedspread, a framed photograph of his late father.

We decided not to name Mr Ape in this story, because of specific concerns over his safety. When we visited him, he told us he was a lonely child who had become a lonely adult. At some point, he said, his pain had morphed into hate. “What was so appealing was to see something else suffer, essentially, that looked human,” he said. “Because I was suffering.”

The BBC spoke to a psychologist about Mr. Ape’s excuse for his behavior. She basically said it was bulls**t. Anyone doing what he was doing had probably been thinking about it for a long time. Personally, I was left wondering what happened to all those dead cats buried in the backyard but the story doesn’t say any more about them.

I don’t know what to make of all of this except that it doesn’t improve my view of humanity as a whole. There have always been fringe sickos out there but in the past they were a lot less likely to find one another on the street. Thanks to the internet it’s possible to find hundreds or thousands of similar sickos. Again, this isn’t a new problem but it does seem to be getting worse lately.

It feels like civilized society has failed to realize the degree to which the barbarians are at the digital gates. We put sex offenders on a registry and force them to notify law enforcement when they move. We keep them away from schools and children. It’s even possible to look up their status online. Obviously that’s a special case and shouldn’t apply to most crimes, but maybe it’s not that special. Maybe we should do the same for other types of sadistic offenders. Frankly, if anyone from the monkey torture group lived in my neighborhood, I’d want to know. It’s worrisome that there are 400 of these people out there living in mom’s basement and most of us don’t know who they are.