Late last month, Larry Poltavtsev, of the Spectrum Human Rights Alliance, an advocacy group promoting gay rights in Eastern Europe, published a video that depicts a fifteen-year-old Russian boy in a puffy blue coat walking through a park in the snow. Suddenly, he is waylaid—ambushed by a group of teen-agers who force him toward a green bench. “Sit your ass down,” they tell the boy. “We are fifteen and you are fifteen. But you are gay. You are gay and you fuck old men.”

The twenty-minute video shows the gang approaching and surrounding the boy, who appears to be alone; the camera is in unsteady hands. “You will be the star of the Internet,” someone announces. The boy, who learned to walk and talk in the every-phone-is-a-camera age, reflexively holds up the peace sign. They pressure him to declare his name, his school, and his parents, and to say that he had come to the park to visit a man he knew as “Uncle Dima,” with whom he’d connected online. “We will post this video on your wall every day,” the band declares. Then they pour urine on the boy from a beer bottle and kick him and the camera cuts away.

For everything else that has changed in the past decade or so, the essential dynamic of bullying has not: the strong pick on the weak. But social media and YouTube have fostered a global public square where mean things go to never die. Now a cell phone is all one needs to stage a performance of humiliation that will exist in perpetuity.

In the middle of the ritual, the gang asks the boy in the blue coat how he feels about a man named Maxim Martsinkevich, their unseen ringleader. Martsinkevich, who also goes by the nickname “Tesak,” or Cleaver, is the twenty-nine-year-old founder of Occupy-Pedofilyay, who, as self-branded “pedophile fighters,” have made an ugly sport of luring men, young and old, with fake online personals ads, then setting upon and filming them when they arrive at designated meeting spots—an especially perverse form of outing.

Previously, Martsinkevich was a skinhead and the leader of the disbanded neo-Nazi group Format18. He was arrested for shouting “Sieg heil” and “kill the liberals” in public, and served three years in jail for committing ethnic hate crimes: in a 2006 video distributed by his group, people in Ku Klux Klan robes performed a mock execution of a Central Asian drug dealer by hanging and dismembering him. Martsinkevich now sports a Mohawk and leads Restrukt, an ultra-nationalist “social” movement that promotes fitness tips and swastikas alike. He constantly posts pictures of his bare chest on Instagram; his profile on VKontakte, the Russian Facebook of sorts, features over three thousand photos, many of himself in various states of pose, as in an S.S. coat. He talks of reversing the course of moral degradation with a “fundamentally new union of Russian people.” In his eyes, homosexuality is “pedophilia,” and it is a signifier of a weak state.

By establishing a new, “like”-able rubric for bullying—what does it mean, precisely, to be a social-media fan of a hate group?—Martsinkevich has developed a new activity for bored and conforming teen-age boys. He knows how to take advantage of their numbers and the political climate: hundreds of groups and fan pages have mushroomed in the moisture of Martsinkevich’s Occupy. And VK has done little to stanch the rush of anti-gay videos.

The police have also allowed groups like Occupy-Pedofilyay to operate with impunity. In the streets of Russia today, gay couples cannot hold hands, and clothes with rainbow patterns are legally at risk. A law against “homosexual propaganda” makes it illegal to speak of gay and straight relationships as equal, or to take part in a Moscow pride parade. A recent study showed that eighty-five per cent of Russians oppose gay marriage; eighty-nine per cent say they have no gay friends or relatives; thirty-four per cent consider homosexuality a disease; and five per cent think that gays should be “liquidated.”

For gays in Russia, who have few refuges, the Internet may seem like the least dangerous place to explore their identities and desires and to meet others who might share them. But Martsinkevich’s Occupy group exploits this anonymity, cruelly, by trawling messaging boards for victims in order to make a shareable exhibition of their marginality and vulnerability.

This happens beyond Russia, too: anonymous message or confession boards have been put to destructive uses at the most enlightened colleges, while Twitter exchanges seem to dominate even summer breaks at high schools. A fifteen-year-old girl in Canada killed herself last fall after she exposed her breasts to a man online, and was made into the Web equivalent of a punching bag. Another young woman sent her boyfriend naked pictures and videos of herself, which he posted all over the Internet after they broke up, along with her name and contact information; she was forced to quit her teaching job and changed her name. Images distributed and shared over social media were at the center of the Steubenville rape case, which was reported on for the magazine by Ariel Levy.

While the Internet has escalated the stakes of bullying in American schools, at least the powers that be know—and care. For gays and lesbians in Russia, the culture creating these vicious and violent videos, and sharing and tweeting them, is only gaining ground; Putin’s new law all but encourages the distribution.

As Poltavtsev told Amar Toor at The Verge, “Being outed in a small city or village in Russia very often means death. Exposed teenagers may commit suicide, or they’ll be harassed by your peers, their parents may kick them out of their house. It’s a nightmare.” And all you need to out someone is a phone with a camera.