Welcome to your custom deep dive. I'm so glad
you're joining us today because, well, we have
a truly compelling and honestly quite dark stack
of research to get through. Yeah, it is definitely
on the darker side. For sure. For this deep dive,
our mission is to explore the ethically complex
and frankly incredibly grim history of the early
Internet. And we are doing this by unpacking
a single, deeply detailed Wikipedia source. It
covers the rise, the various controversies, and
the ultimate fall of a Canadian shock site known
as Best Gore. And right off the bat, because
of the nature of the source material you've provided,
we are going to be discussing the existence of
some highly disturbing content today. Yeah. Viewer
or listener discretion is advised for sure. Exactly.
But the reason we're exploring this isn't for
some morbid history lesson. It's a really profound
look at the Wild West days of the web. It forces
us to ask how society decides what information
is simply too dangerous to view. You know, where
the legal line of obscenity is actually drawn.
And what happens when those boundaries are pushed
to their absolute breaking point? We are looking
at how a website that intentionally hosted the
Internet's most gruesome content ended up sparking
a massive national legal battle. A battle over
morality, freedom of information, and the very
definition of Internet censorship. Okay, let's
unpack this. We need to start with the anatomy
of this site and the bizarre economics of running
it. Best Gore was launched on April 30th, 2008.
The site was owned and operated by a man named
Mark Merrick, and it stayed active all the way
until November 2020. Which is wild. 12 years
is an absolute eternity in internet time. Yeah.
Especially for a site operating on the extreme
fringes. Yeah. Absolutely. You have to remember
what the Internet landscape looked like back
in 2008. We didn't have the heavily sanitized
algorithmic social media feeds we have today.
The Web was still very much a frontier. And the
content on this particular frontier was exactly
what you would expect from the term shock site,
but taken to the absolute limit. Yeah. They didn't
hold back. Not at all. We're talking about photos
and videos of murders, suicides, torture, and
mutilations. They hosted unedited footage of
open surgeries, horrific traffic collisions,
and even live assassinations. Just incredibly
graphic stuff. And beyond the physical violence,
the site also hosted leaked government documents
and raw files from the CIA and the FBI. It was
essentially this repository for things you were
never supposed to see. You would think. Given
the dark voyeuristic nature of human curiosity,
that a site offering such forbidden content would
be highly lucrative. Right, you'd assume he was
making a fortune. But this is where the mundane
reality of the internet collides with the fringes
of content hosting. Running a website with massive
amounts of high bandwidth video traffic costs
a fortune. All the server costs alone. Exactly.
You have server costs, constant maintenance,
exorbitant bandwidth fees. In a 2017 interview
with GQ Australia, Mark Merrick actually admitted
that running Best Gore costs more than it generated
in revenue. Wait, so if he's paying those exorbitant
server costs out of pocket and basically losing
money for 12 years, why keep doing it? Was it
purely ideological for him? It seems to be this
mix of intense... ideological commitment, and
just a total inability to monetize the traffic.
It really reveals the hidden architecture of
the internet ecosystem. How so? Well, we often
think of these extreme shock sites as lawless
spaces. Right. Existing completely outside the
rules of normal society. But ultimately, even
the darkest corners of the web are bound by the
incredibly mundane realities of ad revenue. Oh,
right. Advertisers. Yeah. You can host the most
shocking content on earth, but if a mid -level
marketing executive at a mattress company won't
put a banner ad next to it, your site is going
to bleed money. Merrick actually had a very telling
quote about that specific ad revenue irony. He
said, and I'm quoting here, no company with a
reasonable budget would want to advertise on
a website that exposes police brutality, government
abuse of citizens, war profiteering, and similar
anti -people activities. He goes on to say, so
all I'm left with is porn. Worse yet, porn earns
less today than it did five years ago. It grounds
the whole operation in this weird bureaucratic
reality. The modern Internet is largely sanitized
by corporate interests. Best Gore was a massive,
highly trafficked anomaly that simply couldn't
survive the corporate ad model. But despite those
financial struggles, the site continued. And
then in June 2012, it hit a major inflection
point. A huge one. This was the catalyst that
brought best score from the dark corners of the
web right into the glaring spotlight of mainstream
media and international law enforcement. The
site gained massive attention for hosting a graphic
video titled One Lunatic. One ice pick. This
was a highly publicized, deeply disturbing case.
The video depicted the actual murder, rape and
dismemberment of an international student named
Jun Lin, committed by a man named Luca Magnata.
And we should clarify the terms here. Right.
Just to be technically precise about the terminology.
While some media might loosely call something
like that a snuff film, legally and technically,
a snuff film implies a murder committed specifically
for commercial financial gain. Which this wasn't.
No, this was a recorded murder uploaded for notoriety.
And when this video surfaced on Best Gore, the
public outcry was immediate and intense. Almost
immediately, we get these wildly clashing narratives
about how the site handled the video. According
to the police, Mark Merrick initially refused
their request to remove the horrific footage
from the website. But Merrick vehemently denied
that version of events. Yeah, he was very specific
in his denial. He was. Merrick stated that he
took it down himself. on his own terms, without
being asked. He went on to say that if the police
had made a request, as they alleged, he would
have simply told them that the video had already
been down for days. So you have a direct, unresolvable
contradiction between law enforcement and the
site operator regarding the timeline and the
intent behind removing the video. Which brings
up the crucial legal threshold of all this. It's
one thing to have a platform where users might
upload terrible things independently. It's another
thing entirely once the platform owner knows
it's there. Exactly. The source brings in the
perspective of a Toronto -based lawyer specializing
in internet law named Gilles Velloni. What did
he say? He argued that the evidence absolutely
supported the laying of obscenity charges against
Best Gore. Zvonoyne stated, there's no real crime
where there's no knowledge. But once they got
notice of that and they allowed it to stay on
there, that's when the legal line is crossed.
It's the critical debate of active hosting versus
passive platforming. The Internet largely relies
on safe harbor laws. The idea that a platform
isn't responsible for what a user posts, as long
as the platform acts to remove illegal content
once they are made aware of it. Right, like YouTube
or Reddit taking down flag posts. Exactly. The
legal argument against Merrick hinges on that
exact moment of awareness. Once the operator
is aware that a recorded murder is actively being
hosted and viewed on their servers, any delay
in taking it down transforms the site from a
neutral host into an active distributor of obscene
material. Here's where it gets really interesting,
though, because you would think the defense for
running a site like this would just be a strict
First Amendment style freedom of speech argument.
Yeah, the classic Internet should be completely
unregulated. Right. But Mark Merrick's defense
of his website was far more bizarre and honestly,
a complex psychological claim. He argued a public
service defense. He essentially claimed the best
gore served a positive, necessary function for
society. To explain this, Merrick used a really
striking analogy. He compared the extremely gory,
horrific videos on his website to the graphic
images that the Canadian government mandates
be printed on cigarette packaging to deter people
from smoking. The logic being that if you see
the horrific physical consequences of an action
in vivid detail, you will avoid that action.
Precisely. And Merrick actually tried to back
this up with testimonies from his readers. He
said he regularly received positive feedback
about how watching this horrific content saved
lives. Really saved lives. That's what he claimed.
Users allegedly told him that viewing these tragic
accidents and violent outcomes convinced them
to avoid everyday risks. He specifically cited
things like speeding, darting between traffic
on a motorcycle and even horseplay with forklifts.
Wow. He even went so far as to claim that the
site had persuaded some individuals not to commit
suicide. What's fascinating here is it prompts
you as the listener to really think critically
about human nature. He's presenting exposure
to raw trauma as a form of extreme aversion therapy
for the general public. Like staring at a car
crash. Exactly. We all know the phenomenon of
rubbernecking at a car crash. There is a dark.
human impulse to look at disaster. Merrick was
arguing that satisfying that impulse makes us
safer. Does it, though? That's the debate. Does
witnessing the absolute worst case scenario,
the unedited brutal reality of a workplace accident,
actually act as a deterrent to risky behavior?
Or does indiscriminate exposure to that level
of graphic violence simply traumatize and desensitize
the viewer? I have to imagine most psychologists
would lean toward the latter. And unsurprisingly,
the police did not buy the public service argument
either. The legal hammer eventually fell. It
was only a matter of time. Following the investigation
by the Montreal police into the Magnata video,
Mark Merrick was officially charged by Edmonton
police on July 16th, 2013. And the specific charge
is what makes this case so historically significant.
Because it wasn't just a generic internet crime?
No, he was hit with a highly unusual charge under
Section 163 of the Canadian Criminal Code. The
charge was corrupting morals. Corrupting morals.
It's a phrase that sounds like it belongs in
the 19th century, not the digital age. Very Victorian.
Yeah. It's an incredibly rare charge, carrying
a maximum sentence of two years in prison. And
the language used by the authorities really highlights
how they viewed the site. One police investigator
didn't just call it a hub for violence. They
described Best Gore as a racist website, inciting
hate, hatred, violence, violence above and beyond
anything normal. So the authorities are painting
a picture of a site that isn't just a neutral
repository for morbid reality, but an active
engine for societal degradation. Right. The legal
saga that followed was messy. Merrick was initially
released on bail, but then just 10 days later
on July 26th, he was re -arrested for allegedly
violating the terms of his release. This dragged
on for years. Years of legal back and forth.
Until finally in January 2016, Merrick pleaded
guilty. He received a conditional sentence of
three months of house arrest, followed by three
months of community service. A seemingly light
sentence after such a rare and heavy charge.
But Merrick didn't just quietly accept the premise
of the corrupting morals law. In a November 2013
interview with Adrienne Jeffries of The Verge,
he aggressively pushed back against the charge
itself, arguing that Section 163 was wildly antiquated.
He actually made a great point about the history
of the law. Merrick pointed out that Section
163 originally prohibited the distribution of
crime comics and methods of curing venereal disease.
Just think about the absurdity of that for a
second. The legal system is trying to regulate
a 21st century digital shock site streaming global
unedited violence. And the only tool they have
is a law originally written to stop teenagers
from buying vintage crime comics or pamphlets
about medical cures in the 1950s. It's crazy
when you put it that way. It perfectly illustrates
how analog laws are often blunt, ineffective
instruments when trying to police digital ghosts.
Because of that outdated origin, Merrick argued
the law was being enforced selectively. He felt
it could be used indiscriminately against anyone
the government simply decided they didn't like.
If we connect this to the bigger picture, Merrick
was constructing a narrative that best score
wasn't a corrupting influence at all, but rather
an essential tool for unvarnished truth. And
this brings us to his most complex and arguably
most controversial defense. OK, I'm ready. He
claimed that his community of users, people who
were drawn together by a shared morbid curiosity,
had actually evolved into an elite, crowdsourced
anti -propaganda unit. Now, to be completely
clear here, we aren't validating Merrick's geopolitics
or independently verifying these global claims.
We're just looking at the defense he built to
justify his site's existence to the public. Exactly.
We are looking purely at the mechanism he claimed
was happening on his site. Merrick argued that
because his users consumed so much raw, unedited
footage of global violence and accidents, they
had developed an encyclopedic visual memory of
tragedy. They remembered everything they watched.
Right. So when governments or rebel groups would
try to repurpose old footage to push a new political
narrative, the best gore community would instantly
recognize it and debunk it. There are three very
specific, detailed examples that Merrick gave
to prove this point, and the geopolitical irony
in them is wild. The first involves a brutal
chainsaw beheading video. According to Merrick,
a Syrian rebel propaganda team circulated this
video claiming the atrocity was committed by
people behind Syrian President Bashar al -Assad.
But Merrick said his users weren't fooled for
a second. They recognized it. Yes. They knew
the video was actually much older, that they
had the full version with original audio, and
that it was actually footage of Sinaloa cartel
members in Mexico. So footage of cartel violence
in North America was allegedly being repackaged
to influence international perception of a Middle
Eastern civil war. And this fringe, shock -site
community caught the lie. Because they had already
scrutinized the original video years prior. Exactly.
The second example Merrick provided was a video
of a domestic gas leak explosion. He claimed
this footage was maliciously manipulated and
circulated to look like the aftermath of indiscriminate
bombings by ruling powers. And let me guess,
the users caught it again. Yep. Again, he says
his community recognized the original context
of the gas leak and busted the propaganda attempt.
The third example is perhaps the most complex
of all. Merritt claimed that a narrative was
spreading globally about Muslims being slaughtered
by Buddhists in Burma, which is now Myanmar.
He stated that the video evidence being used
to fool the world was actually a heavily manipulated
mashup. A mashup? Yeah. According to Merrick,
his users dissected the video frame by frame
and identified that it was stitched together
from three entirely unrelated events. The specifics
of that mashup are staggering. They identified
a lynching video from Kenya, footage of an earthquake
in Tibet, and video of the tsunami disaster in
Thailand. The claim is that they deconstructed
a fake narrative by identifying a Kenyan lynching,
a Tibetan earthquake, and a Thai tsunami, all
spliced together to look like religious violence
in Burma. So what does this all mean? We have
a website built on the darkest impulses of human
curiosity, a site that police called an engine
of hatred. It creates a profound paradox. You
have a community of people colloquially known
as gorehounds individuals who spend their free
time watching the most horrific things imaginable.
Yet, according to Merrick, this exact habit inadvertently
turned them into incredibly effective forensic
analysts. Because they had seen it all before.
Because they had seen the raw source material
of human misery. They were uniquely inoculated
against visual manipulation. They could spot
a geopolitical lie because they recognized the
specific background details from a cartel video
five years prior. It's a total inversion of the
corrupting morals charge. He's essentially saying
we aren't corrupted. We're the only ones seeing
clearly because we refuse to look away. But ultimately,
the era of best gore did come to an end. Interestingly,
the site didn't fall to a massive government
takedown in the end. The source material tells
us that on November 15th, 2020, the website simply
became defunct. Mark Merrick had decided to focus
his attention on other interests. You just walked
away. Yeah. A few days later, on an alternative
decentralized video platform called Elberry .tv,
someone asked if the site was down indefinitely.
Merrick simply replied, most likely permanently.
It ended not with a bang, but with a quiet server
shutdown. A mundane end to a highly controversial
digital era. Which leaves us with the core tension
we've been circling this entire deep dive. Best
Gore existed right on the bleeding edge of the
debate between public morality, freedom of information,
the legal responsibilities of hosting platforms,
and the dark psychological draw of human tragedy.
This raises an important question, and it's the
thought we want to leave you with today. We've
just analyzed how this deeply controversial shock
site community inadvertently acted as a morbid
but apparently effective verification system
against manipulated videos and propaganda. Today,
we are living in a rapidly evolving era of AI
-generated deepfakes, highly curated algorithmic
news feeds, and unprecedented digital manipulation.
So who are the modern arbiters of visual truth?
That is the big question. When the chaotic, unfiltered
shock sites of the early Internet disappear,
do we inadvertently lose an ugly but highly effective
crowdsourced fact -checking mechanism? And if
so, what takes its place in a world we're seeing
is no longer believing. It's a heavy question
and one that only gets more relevant as technology
advances. Thank you so much for joining you or
rather joining us on this complex and challenging
deep dive today. We hope it gave you a new perspective
on the hidden mechanics of the Internet and the
tricky balance between censorship and truth.
Keep questioning the world around you and we
will catch you on the next one.