When the internet was born, so was a new form of bullying – cyberbullying.

38% of people experience cyberbullying daily on social media sites, but what if your child was being harassed by an adult man?

That is the case for many children who spend their time on YouTube, and the bully has become well-known in children’s communities.

His name is Maxcruise73.

To fully understand the situation, I need to introduce you to a subsection of YouTube.

On one side of the platform, people are making videos teaching others how to carry out magic spells.

These videos are clearly targeted at kids, so there’s no surprise that the comment sections are filled with them.

What would you do if you had a disdain towards these videos? You would likely go watch something else, as would a lot of others. But not Max.

In the comments of these videos, you’ll likely find Max replying to kids telling them that they’re not intelligent, that they’re naive, gullible, among a range of other insults. When someone calls him out on his actions, he claims that he’s not bullying them because what he’s saying is facts and logic.

The worst part of it all? He doesn’t back down. He keeps arguing, day after day, until the child has had enough and eventually gives up. 

So what kind of man would dedicate hours of his life to beefing children on the internet?

Max claims that he is a highly intelligent man, who has nine years of education beyond High School under his belt. Despite his intelligence, he has found enough time to have been doing this on the internet for over ten years. He responds to comments quickly, within just ten minutes on occasion, so these comment threads can go on for hours. 

User, LehBigBoi, who brought this mystery to the Internet Mysteries subreddit, has prior experience with Max. They said:

“I’ve never seen a man so hell-bent on harassing children in my life. He harassed me and my friends as kids, and even now we’re full grown adults, he’s still at it.”

u/LehBigBoi

The most disturbing part of this whole thing is that some of the kids clearly feel as though they’ve done something wrong and send their sincerest apologies to Max.

This is the case on one video, where he comments saying that he accepts the uploader’s apology and that he forgives them for their prior actions. 

The likely conclusion to this whole thing is that Max is someone with very little power and influence in their day-to-day life. This may lead to him feeling insignificant and so he gets a buzz from feeling powerful over kids on the internet.

This is no excuse though, and it is creepy how long he has been carrying this out. I do think that he should be looked into and probably banned from YouTube, as surely this has got to be against their ToS in some way. 

Until something is done about him, Maxcruise will continue to be a menace to the spell community and carry on his hobby of being a relentless cyberbully.