The Forgotten Man in “Don’t F**k With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer”

Last year, I came across a documentary called “Don’t F**k With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer”. The documentary is about how a group of tech-savvy was able to hunt down Luka Magnotta, a notorious animal abuser who was also charged for the First-degree murder of a Chinese student. Nevertheless, this blog post is not about the power of digital footprints in tracking. Instead, I would like to focus on a man that the documentary barely mentioned, and you will soon find out why. 

In 2010, Magnotta uploaded a video of him suffocating two kittens with a vacuum bag. This enraged numerous animal lovers, and a Facebook group was later formed to find the perpetrator. They tried to analyze everything that was featured in the video in order to identify and locate Magnotta. 

Meanwhile, a guy named Jamsey posted a video of a cat being burned alive caught their attention, and his Facebook profile photo resembled Magnotta. Most importantly, he later admitted that he was the Kitten Killer. People were FURIOUS, and plenty of threatening comments were left on Jamsey’s Facebook page.

Soon after, Jamsey’s true identity was discovered by one of the group members. He turned out not to be who they were looking for, and his real name was Edward Jordan. Unfortunately, people later learned that Jordan had taken his own life,  and that he was just trolling online to avoid the severe depression that he was going through.

This also reminded me of the Human Flesh Search Engines (HFSE) in China. It is a means of search powered by the cooperation between netizens to “learn the truth and exercise their rights of supervision and criticism” (Yang and Zheng 2010). As traditional search engines are based on keyword matching, superfluous information are hard to avoid. And therefore human power is a more sophisticated tool for sifting through information. However, the process of seeking justice often involves personal information leakages, and just like the manhunt of Magnotta, these “hunters” are only human after all. No matter how meticulous they are, they can still make mistakes and people can get wrongly accused.

Fast-forward to today, I still often think to myself whether the activists should be considered entirely innocent for Jordan’s death just because they had good intentions. “The animal activists, in my opinion, they are a disgrace. You are not the police, and you are also acting like stalkers”. Regardless of this being a quote by Magnotta’s mother, I think it still does point to the fact that there is a thin line between hunting and stalking.