Violent online networks like 764 show how terrifying the dark web is for young children
Parents, do you know what your kids are doing online? If not, the answer may terrify you.Last month, the FBI issued a warning about the growing threat of violent online networks targeting minors.Lurking on gaming platforms, social media or self-help forums, members of these networks lavish attention on their targets.After the grooming comes the demands: that victims carve occult symbols or the names of their abusers onto their bodies (a practice known as “fansigning”).That they share sexually explicit videos or mutilate their pets on camera.
That they livestream their own suicides.When victims disengage, they’re doxed and swatted, threatened with violence, blackmailed or extorted.Most victims are teens.Some are younger.It’s the stuff of nightmares, and dismantling these virulent networks is now a top national security priority across the United States and Europe.But most parents have no idea they exist.Many of these networks, with names like 764, the Com, No Lives Matter and True Crime Community, belong to a loosely connected subculture called nihilistic violent extremism.This is influencer culture at its darkest, where status comes from creating the worst-possible content.
Videos of beheadings, dismemberings, torture and child pornography freely circulate.Consuming ultra-violent content online fuels real-world creation.Take 17-year-old Solomon Henderson, who shot and killed a student at his school in Antioch, Tenn., in January, wounding two others before taking his own life.He left behind a manifesto, now standard procedure for online extremists.
No surprise his manifesto and social-media footprint are rife with tragedy, self-loathing and rage — along with horrific imagery and references to nihilistic extremism and neo-NazismIt glorified school shooters he idolized — including Natalie Rupnow, who killed two of her classmates and wounded six more in December 2024 in Madison, Wis., before taking her own life.She frequented school-shooter-obsessed forum...