Cyberscams, sexual assault, anti-Semitism… however much each of those sets you off, most people would agree on how to rank them from most to least to serious. Most people could also tease out a few characteristics that would be relevant when considering the harm they cause and the punishment they should entail. Yet all three carry the same punishment from the current wave of Internet vigilantes: dissolving the accused’s life into a nihilistic content stream.
The cancelation mobs of the last decade were moral panic promiscuous. They’d take out some targets under the banner (well, hashtag) of Black Lives Matter, others on MeToo grounds, and others still for COVID-related transgressions—and combinations of all three, and often all in the same scrolling session.
Today’s digital hunter-killers, though, are cause-specific. They are also much more strategic and aggressive. They use dossiers and domain squatting as first strikes against their targets’ reputations and identities. Their platforms catalog all the “evidence” they have assembled against their target: screen shots from social media, open letters or petitions they have signed, public records from court proceedings, leaked documents, and affiliations with disfavored organizations or movements.
And it’s all packaged as content. What you click, watch, and engage with today seals the target’s future.
Search and destroy
Organizations like StopAntisemitism and Canary Mission count on schools, employers, civic groups, and everyday citizens to search their mugbooks to ensure they do not admit, hire, or go on a date with anyone whom these groups have deemed anti-Semites. The dossier sites at target’s-name-dot-com are much more dangerous. They leverage SEO to annihilate the target’s reputation and ruin their prospects—professional, social, romantic, familial—for the rest of their lives. The people behind these sites do not shy away from their embrace of vigilantism. They revel in their ability and rectitude to overcome what they see as the failures of the law, whether that is thought-crimes not being actual crimes, a district attorney’s decision not to prosecute, differing standards of culpability and punishment for minors, or the duration of judicial proceedings.
“We created consequences. A lot of them,” Liora Rez told the Jerusalem Post Gala at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, in December 2025. Rez is the cofounder of StopAntisemitism. About 400 of the 1,000 people listed at the site, she told her audience, “have faced real consequences, including firings, suspensions, and expulsions.”
Those are serious events in someone’s life. But they are the most superficial consequences of being canceled. Rez knows what else happens, and that’s what she’s really gunning for. “When you look for a job, when you look for a spouse, when you look for a nanny, when you look for anything, our work will always be documented.”
Rez wants her group to have the last word on people’s lives. Twice in her speech she gives “thanks to Google and SEO” for enabling these dossiers to “follow you for the rest of your life,” and she looks forward to ChatGPT (and presumably other AI services) coming alongside. Whatever else they do, whatever else they are, Rez wants StopAntisemitism’s dossiers to replace the entirety of that individual’s identity with one word: anti-Semite.
Rez might have the strongest claim for legitimacy among the vigilantes. There are no laws in the United States against anti-Semitism—only social norms. As such, only social punishments are available and applicable.
But there’s no reason to think Rez would change course if anti-Semitism were criminalized in the US. Social punishment is often more painful than the judicial punishment, even including incarceration, and far outlasts a prison term. An eighteenth-century French scholar wrote: “Public opinion forms a considerable part of the punishment. It prolongs its duration, [and] renders the reparation of the innocent almost impossible.”
Social stigma in the digital era is unequivocally a life sentence. That’s the draw for people with the “eliminative mindset” to this niche of content creation, both producers and consumers.
Hunter, killer, content creator
Mariana van Zeller interviewed assassins, cartel bosses, people involved in the human organ trade, and human traffickers for her show “Trafficked.” She met gang members in favelas and South African slums, filmed people carrying black market crude oil in squishy plastic tubes in Africa, and interviewed people at the tranq epicenter in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood. My partner tapped out during the latter episode and skipped a few others, but I watched the entirety of the series. But we all have our limits. After three years of interviewing canceled people I had to turn off a recent episode of her podcast, “The Hidden Third.”
James McGibney hunts for cyber-scammers. When he finds them and assembles his evidence, he puts them “on blast” on Instagram and his other platforms, and buys the domain of their name.
“In some instances, like with a 16-year-old, I am judge, jury, and executioner for this person,” he told van Zeller. And just in case you thought he misspoke or got out over his skis, a few minutes later he confirmed: “If I go after you, yeah, I am the judge, jury, and executioner.”
“[A]ll the main people I’ve gone after, I own their firstlastname.com… I’m going to post all the information about each and every one of them on their own website. I’m replicating that website throughout the United States. So, if these guys are like, ‘Oh, we’ll just call the service provider and get it taken down,’ good luck. There’s servers all throughout the United States of America. I have them.”
McGibney has plenty of criticisms of American law: statutes of limitations, the time it takes to build a case before a prosecutor can bring charges and get a warrant, jurisdictional restrictions on subpoenas and extradition (i.e., the sovereignty of other nations), the fact that parents cannot be held legally accountable for the online activities of their children.
“I’m a huge advocate of law enforcement, obviously, but I just fill that gap of real immediate justice.”
That’s as delusional as it is contradictory.
Van Zeller challenged him on it throughout the interview. “The justice system is slow for a reason,” she said.
She repeatedly came back to the question of the harm that he is doing to his targets. Sometimes she framed it around minors not being sufficiently developed to understand the ethics, legality, or long-term consequences of what they are doing; other times around the fit between crime and punishment, and others around the possibility that he gets something wrong.
Each time, McGibney nods at her point before changing topics to a particularly sympathetic victim or a particularly cruel offender. “When I think about that and I hear that, I don’t give a shit how old that kid is. You’re going to learn that lesson the hard way.”
Another time, he tells van Zeller that he doesn’t worry about ruining an innocent person for life “because I never go after someone who’s not guilty or fully guilty.” Remember: that’s guilty in his eyes, not in the finding of any court.
“I’m never not confident in my decisions. Am I flawed? Sure, of course I’m flawed. But I’m not wrong. I’m not wrong when I’m going after someone.”
“By me putting them on blast, that’s everywhere. The internet’s everywhere.”
Everywhere, and forever. Toby Morton owns domains in the names of the seven Cornell students accused of rape, along with a site for them as a group (one of several that are out there, the domains all being variations of “The Cornell Seven”). Morton’s goal is “to make sure accountability doesn’t have an expiration date.” That’s such great word choice, as one would expect from a former South Park writer, because it harkens back to the risible mantra of the early 2020s: “it’s not cancel culture, it’s accountability culture.”
“America’s oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony.” The Human Stain, Philip Roth
Morton regularly posts screenshots of conversations he has in his direct messages. When one person said “Maybe hold off [and] wait for evidence?” he replied, “As for ‘waiting for evidence,’ that’s adorable.” That’s easy to misinterpret. He’s not snarking at the need for evidence. Like McGibney, Morton gathers his evidence and posts it to the dossiers on his sites. But even if his evidence is 100% accurate, it is at most 50% complete. Whatever the accused will present in their defense, they won’t be running it past Morton first.
Responding to another DM, he has nothing but contempt for the suggestion that the presumption of innocence and right to reputation go hand-in-hand. “How are these poor, raping innocent, misunderstood rapists supposed to enjoy college with everyone discussing the raping?”
His targets merely are dealing with a “reputational inconvenience,” he said. He seems too fervent to believe that this is all it is.
Self-fulfilling and self-justifying
If there’s any belief that the punishment should fit the crime, at least one of Rez, McGibney, and Morton is doing it wrong. Three very different offenses—two crimes, one not—result in the same harm, which is on par with what follows from a proper conviction.
Public humiliation leads to social and professional banishment, which become exile as the stigma overwrites the person’s reputation and social identity.
This identity annihilation combines with the loss of meaning that people derive from their social connections and professional endeavors, resulting in a sense of narrative foreclosure: the inescapable thought that the final pages of their life story have been irreversibly written for them. The concept of narrative foreclosure was first identified in elderly people and people who received a terminal diagnosis: people for whom there is little time and perhaps little physical ability or agency to write the end of their story. People who have been canceled—publicly humiliated, at scale, for a wide range of social transgressions (and occasionally crimes)—evince the same outlook. Feeling like they are at the end of their life, as much as the elderly or terminally ill, they often make it so.
“Digital scarlet letters, electronic tethering and practices of banishment have relegated a growing number of people to the logic of ‘social death,’” anthropologist Roger Lancaster wrote in The New York Times in… 2011.
By the telling of people who know both incarceration and social destruction, these three are imposing the more harmful of the two.
Many of the convicted sex offenders that Emily Horowitz interviewed for her book From Rage to Reason said that they would do more time in prison if it meant not being listed as a registered sex offender upon their release. Their post-incarceration life is more dehumanizing and more restricting than their time locked up because of the civil and social sanctions that follow. These are individuals who, for the most part, admit to their crimes and do not argue their convictions or prison sentences.
One of the most compelling stories, though, was of a woman who was stiff-armed into pleading guilty and was exonerated when her accuser admitted that his accusations were lies. This woman was “far more emotional when speaking about the harms fo the registry than her innocence and the injustice of her wrongful conviction.”
Even if you take the most cynical view of our criminal justice system, these individuals at least had the chance to go through the motions of due process. And the criminal justice system at least gives lip service to rehabilitation and reform inside the walls, even if the proliferation of registries, databases, and watchlists preclude any real life on the outside.
“Creating their false image of him, calling him everything that he wasn’t and could never be, they had not merely misrepresented a professional career...they had killed his wife[.] Killed her as if they’d taken aim and fired a bullet into her heart.” The Human Stain
The domain-and-dossier vigilantes are scaling this model of reputational search-and-destroy. AI search engines, as opposed to traditional search engines, will include such databases if you ask it to do so in your prompt; and Rez and others like her doubtless are working towards having their databases searched by default.
They are also free of the few limitations that constrain the state’s attempt to impose “social death.” As Morton put it: “I have no limits. No boundaries. Nobody to tell me I’ve gone too far.”
These digital destroyers choose nihilism over cynicism. McGibney and Morton, in particular, have set themselves against our systems of justice. McGibney because he doesn’t like the way it works, and Morton because he thinks it doesn’t work at all. McGibney because he thinks it will fail, and Morton because he thinks it has failed. In its place, they’ve installed themselves, and seek only to punish.
More than just circumventing the justice system, McGibney and Morton inhibit it from maybe working.
McGibney, “huge fan of law enforcement” that he is, hands over all his evidence to the authorities. He says the biggest criticism he gets from law enforcement is “that I will scare these people so much that they end up [fleeing] the country, and then the United States is is very limited what they can do.”
He thinks the justice system is constrained and impotent, so he… makes it harder?
Morton, meanwhile, is digging an even deeper hole for the already near-impossible task of finding a jury that has not been completely inflamed in one direction or another. If impaneling a jury becomes impossible, there won’t be a trial even if prosecutors chose to pursue one.
His way of addressing an institutional failure is to ensure the institution’s next failure.
Their stances are self-fulfilling, self-justifying, and perfectly unfalsifiable. If their targets are convicted in a court of law, then they were right this whole time. If their targets are not charged, or go to trial and are acquitted, it just shows that the system truly is broken and that’s why we need avengers like them.
To Catch a Bumfighter
“The Hidden Third” episode with James McGibney was perfectly timed, dropping the week before the release of the movie, Primetime. McGibney’s work is part of To Catch a Predator’s lineage, and McGibney is a gushing fan boy of his cultural cousins who are direct descendants. “God bless these pedo hunters and what they do. I love it. I love watching them go into a Walmart or somewhere, they track down a pedo, and just punch him in the face. Bravo. I love it. Does that person have a fair shake at a trial? I don’t give a shit.”
McGibney is the entire “bumfight economy” distilled into one man: producer, consumer, leading light, biggest fan, spokesman and defender.
Liz Franczak from the “TrueAnon” podcast describes how the last few years of pre-YouTube media production set the stage for the massive and sprawling exploitation and humiliation genres of content. Starting with the original “Bumfights” videos, which overlapped with To Catch a Predator in the mid-2000s, through “Kensington Beach” and McGibney’s “Bullyville”, viewers are consuming contrived narratives that climax in individual human beings at the lowest moment of their lives. She dubbed this the bumfight economy.
It doesn’t matter whether anyone makes money: McGibney said he does not accept ads or sponsors, Morton includes a QR code for his Venmo on some of his Instagram posts, StopAntisemitism has a page for donations. It’s the attention economy. Influence and reach are the currencies. Rez is giving speeches at embassies. McGibney is on a top-rated podcast with a respected journalist. Morton is getting positive coverage in the New York Post, Playboy, and Newsweek.
In their worlds, there is no fact pattern or timeline where the accused are less than fully culpable of the most severe possible offense or crime, nor where the accuser’s story is anything short of fully factual. Their defenses that they rigorously vet every claim and are presenting “just the facts” underscore their total disinterest in the complexity of the situations they document, starting with the complexity of each individual human being involved.
And that’s what their content, as perfect representations of the bumfight economy, rejects: humanity.
Researching the cancelations of the early 2020s and interviewing dozens of canceled people from that time, it’s clear that it was never about them as individuals nor their supposed transgressions. They were canceled, socially eliminated, publicly humiliated, whatever you want to call it, because that’s what mobs do during moral panics, and we had three overlapping moral panics during those years: Black Lives Matter, MeToo, and COVID. The targets were MacGuffins, and the issue was never the issue. The unchanneled anger, resentment, moral frenzy, and bloodletting were the issues.
It was easy to dehumanize the targets because they were just names and social media handles, not actual people.
It was like a video game.
The dossier-and-domain cancelations are more personal. Building these dossiers and posting them on a website bearing their name means you have to get to know them. Searching through their social media feed for an offending statement means at least incidentally seeing pictures of their friends, families, pets, and hobbies. Reading court documents means learning some little something about their backgrounds. You need to either push that out of your mind or let it fuel your hatred—seeing every post as proof of privilege, callousness, or malice—in order to pull the trigger by pressing “Publish” or “Post.”
If before it was like a video game, now it’s more like the first-person view (FPV) videos coming back from battlefield drones. Like their ancestor Chris Hansen, the content-creating destroyers make the kill shot a climax.
People playing video games became a content stream. Kill footage from FPV drones on battlefields became a content stream. Cancelations were already in the feed. Humiliation, exploitation, and pain are intrinsic to cancelations. It was inevitable they, too, would be a content stream. Bumfights all the way down.
“That explains everything. That and the craziness.” The Human Stain
Heinz Leymann was one of the pioneers of mobbing studies. He wrote: “In the societies of the highly industrialized world, the workplace is the only remaining battlefield where people can ‘kill’ each other without running the risk of being taken to court.”
Recall two of the money quotes from above.
McGibney: “I’m never not confident in my decisions. Am I flawed? Sure, of course, I’m flawed. But I’m not wrong. I’m not wrong when I’m going after someone.” And twice, “I’m judge, jury and executioner.”
Morton: “I have no limits. No boundaries. Nobody to tell me I’ve gone too far.”
They are interchangeable with a recent interview where someone was asked about the limits of his authority in actual battlefields, and responded: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” That’s from someone else who captures the entirety of the bumfight economy into one person: President Donald Trump.
It’s pretty easy to update Heinz Leymann’s quote: “In the societies of the highly digitalized world,” or, better yet, “In the global monoculture of the highly online world, the Internet is the only remaining” and the rest stays the same.
But it might be worse than that.
While there was no risk of the mobs being taken to court in Leymann’s days, now the digital assassins act as if they are the courts. Meanwhile, the actual killings on actual battlefields are side-by-side with the mobbings Leymann wrote about. They simply draw different—but maybe not distinct—audiences in the bumfight economy.
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Photo credit: Terje Sollie via Pexels.