Youth radicalization is fast becoming a worldwide epidemic.
While right wing extremism continues to rise globally and Islamic State recruits teenagers for attacks, a less visible but growing threat is emerging from online subcultures and digital communities that fall under the banner of nihilistic violent extremism (NVE). Members of NVE groups tend to be young, often male, and terminally online. This new threat comes with an expedited timeline for radicalization.
Marc-Andre Argentino defines nihilistic violent extremism as “those on the fringe actively encouraging, promoting, glorifying or engaging in serious acts of violence for the sake of violence and chaos in and of itself.”
Nihilistic violent extremism is characterised by the encouragement, glorification or engagement in acts of extreme violence without a coherent ideological framework. Rather than being driven by political or religious objectives, these networks are unified by a misanthropic worldview that normalises and celebrates violence, often with the aim of generating chaos and societal collapse.
Nihilistic violent extremist networks use social media and online gaming platforms, including Tik Tok, X, Instagram, Reddit, TamTam, 4Chan, Telegram, Discord and Roblox to target socially isolated youth. While the typical NVE recruit tends to be under 25, with many under 18, some NVE groups specifically target children as young as six as well as tweens and teens.
They identify youth who may be dealing with one or more vulnerabilities: neurodiversity, eating disorders, social isolation, mental illness, family problems, etc; love bomb them; and pull them into private chats. Once bonds of trust and loyalty are built, which can happen in a matter of days or even hours, perpetrators socialize, cajole, extort and/or exploit the youth to commit acts of self-harm and extreme violence.
The greatest threat from nihilistic violent extremists comes from a decentralized but highly connected set of individuals and groups working through a collection of websites, social media applications, servers, chats, forums, encrypted platforms, and gaming platforms known as the COM or Community network. The activities of COM network groups tend to fall into one of three categories: sexual extortion, cybercrime and offline violence, with some groups favouring one over another.
764 perpetrators tend to target vulnerable youth age 8-17, whom they befriend or initiate romances with online, often via mainstream social media or gaming platforms. They groom the particular youth until loyalty and trust are established, often requesting nudes or sexually suggestive pictures. They then use that content and the threat of exposure to cajole or coerce vulnerable youth to livestream acts of self-harm, animal torture, sibling abuse, sexually explicit behaviour, rape, incest, violence, suicide, or the production of child sexual exploitation content, ever escalating in the severity of their demands. They may insist a child who livestreamed self-harm to send new videos with deeper cuts or they cut a sibling or harm a pet or livestream their own suicide. The content victims produce is put into “lorebooks” and disseminated across the network in order to exert control over the victims and raise the status and clout of the perpetrators. Should the victims resist, perpetrators threaten to share the content with their loved ones, their school, and their community; they threaten to dox them; they call in bomb threats; they swat them; and threaten to harm family members. The ever-escalating threats have led some youths to commit suicide rather than face exposure.
The FBI has investigations ongoing against 764 in every US state, in total estimated at 250 nationwide. However, the international reach of 764 in dozens of countries makes it particularly insidious. Since most of the perpetrators and victims are minors and the crimes can be transnational, law enforcement agencies are often ill equipped to handle these cases.
MKY is another outgrowth of the COM network, part of the offline violence track. It was founded in Ukraine, later spread into Russia and Western Europe, and has been linked to attacks in Canada, Sweden, Romania, the US, Ukraine and Russia. Of the COM-affiliated or linked organizations, Maniac Murder Cult comes the closest to having a discernible ideology, fusing militant accelerationism, violent nihilism, neo-fascism and ethno-supremacy. Their raison d’être to spread chaos and violence for the sake of notoriety, violence and chaos. MKY activities are built around committing acts of extreme violence and terror and the glorification of those acts.
Another COM affiliate, No Lives Matter (NLM) is the English language ehub of Maniac Murder Cult. NLM states that “societal standards should not exist. They are to be crushed by any means possible.” The group labels those who follow societal norms and laws as “mundane” and they encourage their members to terrorize “all who are mundane.” Members connect via anonymous chatrooms on Telegram, Wire, Signal, Matrix, Potato Chat and SimpleX.
Like most COM groups and like MKY, prospective members must commit a crime to join NLM and the more violent the crime, the greater the status and clout one gains within the organization. This could be vandalism, arson, animal abuse, beatings, stabbing, murder, mass murder, “manhunts” and terrorism. They publish guides for members to “sharpen their skills,” where members can learn to make poisons, make IEDs, and learn how to do a proper “manhunt”.
The True Crime Community is a broad term used to refer to an online community of superfans of true crime, mass shooters, serial killers and school shooters. It is an online ecosystem spanning documentaries, podcasts, Reddits and subreddits, Discord servers, Telegram, Tumblr, TikTok, Youtube, X feeds and Wikis39. On the one side are the true crime fans that analyse cases. Some members obsess over particular mass shooters or school shooters affecting their aesthetics and authoring mass shooter fan fiction or online content.
At their most extreme, TCC members carry out attacks modelled on the mass shooters they idolize in a memetic fashion. For example, Buffalo shooter, Hayden Espinosa, and Nick Lee, who plotted a mass shooting at 5 mosques in Singapore, took inspiration from Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant.
This variation in lethality makes the TCC decidedly different from MKY, NLM or 764, but their extreme end is no less threatening. Moreover, not only do TCC members take inspiration from previous school shooters, they embolden one another to carry out attacks through shared chats.
It’s important to note these groups are not rigidly separate; the borders between them are porous. 764, MKY and NLM are part of the COM network. All target children — youths, tweens, and teens — often male, vulnerable, socially isolated and terminally online. All use online mechanisms for recruitment.
There is also a considerable ideological convergence.
NLM, 764 and MKY share misanthropy and militant accelerationism that aims to bring about a collapse of society. All three as well as certain elements of TCC normalize, celebrate, and encourage acts of extreme violence, be it the self-harm, the CSAM and the suicidology of 764, the beatings, stabbings, mass murder and manhunts of NLM and MKY or the school shootings and random stabbings of TCC.
Each group has constructed a system where clout and popularity are achieved through committing and livestreaming or creating content around acts of extreme violence.
NVE networks represent a threat that cannot be ignored and must be taken seriously. Addressing the problem will require a whole of government and a whole of society approach, including the youths themselves, to design and implement effective interventions at all levels and in all vulnerable spaces.
Some governments have begun to take swift action. The US, New Zealand and Canada have listed 764 as a terrorist entity. Canada and the UK have proscribed the Maniac Murder Cult. This, however, is just a start. Combatting this threat is going to require thorough, expeditious cross-national cooperation at all levels.
Social media platforms must both be partner and held accountable for failures to act. The youth themselves must be part of the conversation because they are not only a prime target but they may also have innovative solutions.
This excerpt is taken from ‘The Nihilistic Violent Extremist Ecosystem: A Global Threat’ by Julie Chernov Hwang, PhD, Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations – Goucher College, Senior Research Fellow – The Soufan Center, originally published in the Global Terrorism Index 2026 report.
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