The simps who took down an alleged sex trafficker

Plus! Everyone hates capitalism, Kirkification, and updates on the gambling economy

Pictured: The male loneliness epidemic. (Photo by Ludovic MARIN / AFP via Getty Images)

Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the funniest, most interesting, and strangest stories from around the social internet.

The internet is not just a strange, hyperselected web of people hiding from reality; in many ways, the internet is reality. What happens online shapes real life just as real life shapes what happens online.

Every week, I sift through social media so you don’t have to, collecting the most notable trends, memes, and online dramas in one place. Think of it as a guided tour through the more insane parts of the web, with commentary about what it all means.

If you enjoy internet nonsense but don’t have the time to doomscroll for hours every day, you’re in the right place.

This week, we’re diving into what’s driving anti-capitalist messaging, how youths are disguising themselves as Charlie Kirk, and the young men who found community on a porn message board.

---

A story about gooners that explains our antisocial century

I have no idea what sort of journalistic steroids they’re feeding the reporters over at The Cut, but it must be the good stuff. The most remarkable story I read anywhere this week was Ezra Marcus’ “Revenge of the Simps: How a community of porn addicts tried to rescue the teenage camgirls they worshipped from the clutches of a violent webcam pimp.” (In case it’s not obvious, the link is highly NSFW.)

First of all, yes, let’s savor that incredible title.

The story details how users on “SimpCity” — a message board largely devoted to discussing livestream porn performers — began to suspect that some of their favorite webcam girls were victims of human trafficking and abuse. They noticed that the girls they followed had unexplained bruises, and that at times they could hear crying and screaming from women not on screen.

This being the internet, a group of these gooners banded together to try to investigate what was going on. They called themselves The White Knights (hopefully with a touch of irony).

The White Knights’ sleuthing skills eventually led them to a Seattle-area man named Nikita Tyukalo. Tyukalo, a 21-year-old Andrew Tate admirer, was subsequently arrested and charged with four counts of human trafficking after the Bellevue Police Department received tips from the White Knights.

This story rides the edge between horrifying and absurd. The contrast between the seriousness of the alleged crimes being committed and the ridiculousness of The White Knights (these are, after all, men posting hundreds of pages of commentary on various porn stars) makes the entire thing sound farcical.

At one point, Tyukalo finds out that the simps are on to him and joins one of their group chats to mock them, leading to this astounding exchange:

The back-and-forth continued all night — the simps calling Tyukalo an abuser; Tyukalo mocking the simps as broke, misguided losers and bragging about his McLarens.

“Cars aren’t status in the real world. Just to little kids showing off overpriced Hot Wheels,” wrote Hal.

“Brother,” Tyukalo responded. “Your in a Chaturbate chat.”

Last year, The Argument columnist Derek Thompson wrote that we are living in the Anti-Social Century: Public life and institutions are deteriorating as we spend more time alone, isolated, and online, staring at our phones rather than engaging in real-world relationships and activities. Thompson is definitely on to something important, but the antisocial century is also spawning new forms of niche, online socializing — like, well, Chaturbate chats.

People never stopped wanting community. They’re just getting it in these incredibly strange places. And while it may not be great for society that people are now turning to message boards like SimpCity for social community, it’s certainly interesting.

The White Knights may have been isolated men sitting alone in separate rooms — and many of them exhibit an unhealthy relationship with pornography and women in general — but together they possessed a shared culture and built a common purpose. Some of them spent time tracking down government records. Others tried to build rapport with the performers. They archived streams, tracked addresses, and communicated with police. Eventually they scraped together enough information that they legitimately contributed to the arrest of an abusive criminal.

Part of what happens when mainstream institutions weaken is that people look for alternatives. The failure of reputable systems leads disreputable systems to take their place. As the antisocial century marches forward, I expect to see more stories that revolve around the actions of subreddits, fandoms, message boards, or TikTok audience mobs. These are the places where culture is being created, and whether we like it or not it’s where community happens. And I have a growing sense that every online subculture is a latent institution just waiting to be activated by the right event or discourse.

Trend reporting under late-stage capitalism