Before it was shut down this year, the illicit and unmoderated chat site Coco had been implicated in killings, child sexual abuse and homophobic attacks. T he trial of a year-old man has gripped France and horrified the world after he admitted to repeatedly drugging his wife and, over the course of decades, soliciting dozens of men online to rape her while she was unconscious.
As the men accused of mass rape have taken the stand, they have detailed how Pelicot found them and coordinated his abuse on an illicit chat forum called Coco. The site has become one of the starkest examples in memory of how platforms can result in extreme harm when left unmoderated. Since its founding in , Coco has been implicated in killings, pedophilia, homophobic attacks and sexual assaults as it evaded accountability and led law enforcement on an international manhunt.
When European authorities finally shut down Coco earlier this year and arrested its founder along with other executives, the website had been cited in more than 23, reports of criminal activity and more than victims had been involved in judicial proceedings involving the site, according to French prosecutors.
Founded by the software engineer Isaac Steidl while he was in his early 20s, Coco launched as a free chat site with a simple interface allowing users to communicate anonymously. Although the site asked users to confirm that they were over 18, they could quickly change their age once they gained access to the platform and chat with an invented username. Users would encounter a public landing page once registered to the site, which featured a list of different chat forums dedicated to different subjects.
The sexualized nature of the site meant that many of these forums were dedicated to specific fetishes or contained explicit content. People could also enter private chats on Coco and directly message other users, which one French journalist pretending to be a year-old girl on the site found resulted in a flood of people soliciting them for sex and sending nude images. ACPE had been involved with work on Coco for years, with Antoine training people on how to use the site for research purposes while alerting authorities to illicit and dangerous activity there.
