The High Commissioner for Childhood, Sarah el Haïry, warned of the resurgence reported in the press of the Coco chat, closed by the judiciary in 2024. The new platform, Cocoland, calls itself “without any link to the old site”.
“The return of the Coco site is a real slap in the face to the protection promise we make.” Asked about the resurgence, reported in the press, of the Coco chat, accused in homophobic ambushes and considered by child protection associations as a haven for predators, the High Commissioner for Childhood, Sarah el Haïry, reacted this Saturday, April 18 on RMC: “These sites are not harmless places (…). There are procedures that are being launched, they will allow them to be closed, we will track them down, we will harass them, we will not give them a moment’s respite.”
“The Coco chat is back”, had written the day before the newspaper Ouest-France, recalling that the site closed in 2024 by the judiciary is “cited in 23,000 criminal cases, including Mazan”. For ten years, Dominique Pelicot – sentenced to 20 years of imprisonment in the Mazan rape case – had indeed recruited via Coco the dozens of men with whom he sexually abused his wife, Gisèle Pélicot. Among the crimes for which the site is accused of having served, recalled Sarah el Haïry, “homophobic ambushes, rapes, drug trafficking and human trafficking”.
Cocoland denies being a new Coco
First launched at the Coco.fr address, the initial chat was later registered abroad, becoming Coco.gg. The version spotted by Ouest-France uses a new name and a new URL, Cocoland.cc, a domain name pointing to the Cocos Islands, in Australia. “This discussion site, with perfectly identical technical and visual characteristics, even generates advertising revenue”, note our colleagues from the regional daily.
So, is Cocoland the new Coco? Upon entering the site, a statement denies it: “Our platform is a completely new service, independent and with no legal, technical or organizational link whatsoever with the old Coco site.” In its legal notices, Cocoland defines itself as “a platform without a human operator”, built from ‘”a fragment of the historic Francophone chat, abandoned for years” and operated by an artificial intelligence. It is especially careful to refute any link with the founder of Coco, the Italian Isaac Steidl, indicted in January 2025 in Paris, notably for criminal association as well as for complicity in possession and distribution of child-pornographic images.
