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I sit far from the stage where this drama plays out. I watch from a very tiny little town in Zimbabwe. The internet makes distance feel small. A camera, a stream, a hashtag, and a life is shredded. I do not pretend to be an expert. I know what I see. I know what it feels like when a crowd decides a man is guilty because the camera says so..

The old show To Catch a Predator taught a lesson. It taught viewers that spectacle could look like justice. That program used decoys and hidden cameras. It made judged men into ratings. A new documentary reexamined that legacy and asked whether the show blurred the line between protection and performance.

Today the formula is homegrown and lightning fast. YouTube and unregulated livestream platforms host copycats. Some creators claim noble aims. They say they protect children. Others want clicks. The difference is not always clear. Some do work quietly with police. Some theatrically ambush a man on camera and let the mobs finish him off in comments and shares. The hit that used to be on TV now lands in the palm of any phone that will film.

A young YouTuber who calls himself Schlep made a name by catching alleged predators on Roblox. The platform banned him. Roblox said he broke safety rules and staged scenes that could endanger users. His fans called him a hero. The platform called the stunts reckless. That split is instructive. It shows how messy the line between protecting and exploiting children can become when profit is nearby.

Then there are the cases where the show of justice becomes real harm. College students in Massachusetts and elsewhere posted “first-person” vigilante videos and attacked a man they accused online. Law enforcement had to untangle truth from viral lies. The videos looked like righteous acts. They led to charges, arrests and a messy legal wake. This is not TV. This is blood and bruises. It is also proof that a crowd with a camera can invent guilt and then act on it.

I want children safe. I am not naïve. Predators exist. Some people do try to hurt kids. Decoys and stings run by trained officers can catch real criminals. When police and prosecutors do their jobs, justice can be precise. But what happens when the state looks slow and a camera looks fast? Then people improvise. And when improvisation meets an attention economy, outrage becomes content.

There are two basic models of a sting. The first is discreet. A bait account waits. It does not pursue sexual talk. It waits for someone to start it. That is how you avoid entrapment claims. It is how police often work. It is how decoys in older shows tried to preserve evidence. Your bait account does not manufacture the crime. It records someone who is already seeking to commit one.

The other model is a content model. Here the bait does the asking. The camera cuts and edits. Producers push for confessions. They prompt sexual talk. They prod a meeting. They want a quick, exciting confrontation. They prefer targets who will make a good story. They pick the lonely. They pick the easily baitable. They pick the vulnerable. They pick the loud and the odd. That alone is a confession about motive. It is not protection. It is a strategy for engagement.

I have seen it, and so have many others. There is a pattern in the trolling and the edits. If a channel wants clicks and donations they will target people with public posts about being lonely. They will aim for those who do not read well. They will laugh in the comments when a man seems foolish or strange. They will weight the narrative to make guilt obvious. They will add text and reaction shots and go for the cheap burn. That is content production, not policing.

Worse, I have seen this turn into a checklist for producers. Bonus points if the target is older and works with children. Bonus points if the person is religious. Bonus points if the person seems mentally unwell. Bonus points if the person identifies as trans, or is conventionally unattractive. These are categories that make for dramatic thumbnails. They also reveal a cruel calculus. The safer the target is from public sympathy, the more likely the mob will cheer.

At this point we cross moral lines people once tried to defend. A crew must tell the truth on camera. They should make clear the age of the decoy. They must not doctor evidence. Yet in the race for hits, editing tricks proliferate. Comments are cut. For a better reel, creators will rearrange messages. They will frame a line out of context. They will make it look like the accused knew the decoy was a minor when the record does not show it. Once that video runs, the editing is the verdict.

I am not making excuses for predators. I do not want the man who seeks a child to walk free. But I refuse to let the word “predator” be bandied like a cudgel and then broadcast for sport. When the public acts as accuser and producer at the same time, fair trial evaporates. The accused is not allowed an account. The accused is edited into guilt.

Sometimes the victims of the spectacle are not predators at all. There are documented cases where men with developmental disabilities were dragged into cameras. There are instances where messages were manipulated to fit a narrative. There have been suicides tied to confrontations that use humiliation instead of evidence. This is not a rhetorical worry. These are human costs. The past decade shows it again and again. The internet remembers. The internet never forgives. It keeps the shame alive long after any court has ruled.

If you spend time in comment sections, you hear a new vocabulary of social punishment. “Don’t look at hotter women” has become a silly slogan in some corners. But it hints at a deeper cruelty. The culture that elevates lookism, that deploys fatphobia and ageism, is quick to weaponize private life. It will call a 35-year-old man a “pedo” for dating a 28-year-old woman. It will use age gaps as proof of sin. Social shaming becomes a tool to police desire itself. That is not protection. It is moral hygiene turned rancid.

We are also watching a certain kind of gendered bile reach new heights. Older women who resent younger women show up in threads with gleeful cruelty. They see age gap relationships and call them predatory. They strip lust and agency from adults and replace it with accusation. This is petty, and it is dangerous. We have always had culture wars about who can love whom. Now those wars are filmed and monetized.

I have no patience for that sanctimony. Adults have agency. They make poor choices. They also deserve due process. We do not settle debates about taste by broadcasting people’s shame. Yet that is the business model of many channels. They package outrage. They sell moral certainty. They profit from the humiliation of a life.

There is a second danger. These amateur stings can wreck proper investigations. Evidence gathered by a panicked livestreamer can be inadmissible. A police case built on a shaky public sting may collapse. Worse still, the vigilante’s exposure can make it impossible for prosecutors to pursue a controlled investigation that would protect actual victims. Agencies will sometimes refuse to work with a group that has already turned the event into content. That is not a theoretical point. Investigators have spoken about how viral vigilante material interferes with their work. The result is fewer convictions, not more.

And then there are the creators who make the hunt itself into a brand. They recruit followers who want to emulate them. They sell “mentor” guides, they hawk membership tiers, they monetize outrage. When the scaffolding of justice is replaced by a Patreon and a sponsored livestream, the motive is clear. You cannot trust the net to police itself when money and fame are in the balance.

Some groups have done good work. Not all citizen efforts are reckless. The Sweetie avatar project helped identify thousands of potential abusers and gave data to Interpol. Those operations were run in partnership with organizations and research teams, and they passed information to law enforcement. But even that project faced questions about entrapment and legal risk. The line remains thin between public interest and legal jeopardy. We must not romanticize any intervention simply because it is outraged or viral.

You can feel the cynicism in many places. I read threads where men express relief because a stranger online “did the job the cops would not.” I read other threads where that relief smells like opportunism. I ask myself what we lose when we cheer a mob. We lose our ideals about evidence. We lose our faith in process. We make cruelty normal.

If I am to propose a way forward, it is small and practical. Fund sex-abuse units properly. Train officers for the web age. Make reporting easier and safer for victims. Ensure that platforms have accountable channels for handing evidence to police, without making vigilante theater the only route to attention. Protect the due process rights of the accused while we build systems that treat victims with care. If you are a content creator and you think you can run a sting better than a trained investigator, think again. If you think your clip will prompt action, understand that your clip might also destroy a case.

Most of all, we must ask why we prefer spectacle to the slow work of institutions. We want justice fast. We want it satisfying. The camera gives us that hit. It also gives us havoc. It turns grief into entertainment. It makes cruelty clickable.

The world feels small, and precarious. Watching strangers get lit up on a screen has become a kind of cheap ritual in faraway places. I remember that rituals can do harm. They can bind communities. They can also break lives.

I do not have a simple cure. I have only a warning. If we keep turning justice into content, we will be asked to choose between the truth and the show. We will keep choosing the show. We will keep losing people along the way. And the law — the slow, flawed law — will become less and less able to fix what the crowd has torn. We must stop and think. We must stop filming first and feeling later.