Introducing Top Comment... The vigilante streamers destroying reputations

**Marianna Spring** (0:00)
Hi, Americasters, it's Marianna. As you may know, as well as my duties as misinformation, in my day job, I investigate everything social media, and I co-host another BBC podcast with investigative journalist, Matt Shea.
It's called Top Comment. Every week, we dive into the algorithm to find out what's behind the trends emerging on social media and spilling into the real world. If you like the sound of that, then good news. Here's our latest episode for you to get your teeth into.

**Matt Shea** (0:24)
Marianna, today you're going to tell us about Andy Burnham, who's now the most popular influencer on social media and also a prime minister as a side hustle.

**Marianna Spring** (0:33)
The media have been going kind of wild this week about his social media strategy. So we are going to be unpicking the secret source, if we're going to call it that, who are the young women who seem to be propelling him to internet stardom and how much longevity does that stardom have? We're also going to be talking about these social media vigilanties, aren't we, Matt?

**Matt Shea** (0:51)
We're going to talk about how social media vigilantism has continued to evolve and is now basically one of the biggest genres on social media, pedophile hunters, pickpocket hunters, scammer hunters, and how it's getting more violent and more dangerous.

**Marianna Spring** (1:12)
Okay, so Matt, when it comes to this social media vigilantism, I guess we're mainly talking about where people would have seen these videos of people chasing down pickpockets or people organizing to meet up with or tracking down alleged pedophiles and confronting them. All that kind of stuff, which isn't new to the internet, right?

**Matt Shea** (1:34)
No, and it isn't new to life either. I mean, there's To Catch a Predator.
There's always been this vigilantism, period. But this has expanded to be one of the most successful genres on social media now. It is growing and growing. Psychologically, for some reason, it works. It gets millions of views. And it's now entered a new kind of darker era. And we're going to get into the details of that. But it's become more violent. There have been people who have been targeted by it, who aren't necessarily guilty of the things they're being accused of. And it's also had a lot of crossover with the far right. And so there's become a kind of racist undertone to it that is increasingly featuring in the social media vigilantism.

**Marianna Spring** (2:18)
And I guess one of the reasons for that could be because it's the sort of content that you can stream, can't you? I mean, it's almost like in real time, you can, because I've seen quite a lot of the clips, sometimes that will have come from streams where someone has actively chased down a pickpocket, like they've come off a particular metro or tube or whatever, and they followed them and they shout pickpocket and all of that kind of stuff. But I guess because it almost feels like a choose your own adventure play along with me, it's quite gripping content because you're like, are they going to track them down? Are they going to find them?

**Matt Shea** (2:46)
Exactly, and I think the response to the pickpocketing stuff has been largely positive. I think people like that.
But there's recently also been people who chase down unlicensed street performers, scammers. You know the cup and ball game where you have to guess which-

**Marianna Spring** (3:02)
You have to guess where it is.

**Matt Shea** (3:03)
Yeah, so that's a kind of a well-known scam.
But there's an account that chases down people involved with that and sprays them with red paint. We don't know if the person doing the spraying with the red paint knows who's involved in this scam. We don't know how he knows who's guilty, but he's just taking it upon himself to spray them with red paint. It's pretty brutal. It's not nice to watch.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:24)
That's me hunting a gang of scammers in London. Scammers! That's a scammer giving me a taste of my own medicine after I exposed his entire gang on the Westminster Bridge.

**Matt Shea** (3:37)
But increasingly, the most controversial kind of vigilantism is pedophile hunting.

**Marianna Spring** (3:44)
When I think of pedophile hunting, I think of those clips. There's that really, really famous viral clip like, I'm panicking. I'm going to lose my job.

**Matt Shea** (3:52)
Now I'm panicking.

**Marianna Spring** (3:53)
Don't panic. Now I am because I'm going to lose my job. You think of the stuff that's almost a little bit, I mean, quite sad really, quite pitiful, quite comical. But it's taking a bit more of a violent twist these days, isn't it?