FBI Points to Increase in Nihilistic Violent Extremism

Violence as status-seeking, rather than motivated by ideology, now has a mainstream digital audience. A growing number of mostly young men are taking part in or encouraging brutality to gain status among their peers, investigators and academic researchers say — what federal authorities refer to as nihilistic violent extremism, or NVE.

“Unlike traditional extremist movements, NVEs coalesce around the shared goal of using violence to gain attention and notoriety, not political doctrine,” the F.B.I. said. The clout they covet comes in the form of reposts, mentions, and status inside cloistered enclaves, not policy change or propaganda triumphs.

What NVEs Are and Why They Matter to Public Safety

New York University Center for Business and Human Rights researchers call NVEs violence-first communities that worship past attackers, remix their content, and promote performance attacks to impress each other. The ideology is deliberately incoherent; the common thread is fascination with gore, power, and the promise of internet fame.

Federal agents have started alluding to the NVE label in court filings, signaling a change in threat assessment. A significant percentage of the domestic terrorism investigations now underway are people radicalized by a loose, sometimes hate-infused reading of society and a yearning for virality rather than allegiance to any centralized cause, officials say.

Inside the Clout Economy of Violence and Online Notoriety

In NVE-aligned spaces, status is gamified. Members “level up” by posting graphic content that promotes violence, endorsing others’ posts, or claiming proximity to real-world violence. Research describes scorekeeping language, ritualized praising of infamous killers, and challenges that turn more threatening in the real world.

That reality runs up against the always-on online life of young people. Forty-five percent of US teens say they are online “almost constantly,” according to the Pew Research Center. That constant presence, in NVE channels, means a steady stream of validation loops where the loudest, most transgressive behavior is the attention-getter.

Where These Networks Gather and How They Organize

NVE communities span both mainstream and marginalized platforms; the most active organizing, however, tends to occur on closed or encrypted spaces across platforms like Discord, Telegram, and WhatsApp. Patterns of migration are familiar: When moderation tightens, groups splinter into invite-only servers and regroup elsewhere.

Industry groups including the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism and Tech Against Terrorism have cautioned that smaller, less-regulated platforms have particular struggles — especially when content is copied, rehosted, and stripped of its context quickly in an effort to avoid detection.

The Copycat Loop and Recent Cases Linked to NVE Trends

Idolization of high-profile attackers is a key marker. Researchers point to a community that commemorates days related to previous mass killings and encourages members to “one-up” past atrocities for status. The phenomenon is an example of the copycat dynamics documented for years in school shootings, but with influence as the overt prize.

Recent cases in the US include attacks at a church in Minneapolis and a high school in Colorado, where suspects frequented NVE-aligned spaces that glorified violence. In another case reported by Wired, the leader of internet group 764 was charged in a child exploitation ring from which members needed to show loyalty and rise in status — an example of how cruelty can be harnessed in climbing an insider’s hierarchy.

The pattern isn’t entirely American. Police in Sweden and Belgium have traced youth assaults that were recorded to be shared with closed groups, and Europol has underlined the obfuscation of online dares with real-world attacks in its organized crime threat assessments.

How Big of a Threat Nihilistic Violent Extremism Has Become

Law enforcement officials say this trend of NVE is a growing piece of domestic terrorism work, with over a thousand open cases nationwide. Analysts at N.Y.U. say that giving it a category benefits agencies and platforms, as they can more easily differentiate between performative violence and ideologically driven plots, enhancing early-warning signs and response protocols.

For years, the US Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center has found in repeated studies that attackers often leak their intent or fascination with violence before they try to carry out a mass act of violence. In NVE ecosystems, these leaks can also function as recruitment — content that transmits risk and a bid for attention.

What Parents, Platforms, and Policymakers Can Do

For families, look for:

• Sudden secrecy around new private chats
• Obsession over gore or previous attackers on the site
• Game scorekeeping language about “levels”
• Strong anxiety about online status

Trusted adults can steer them toward offline anchors — sports, music groups, community programs — and consult with school-based threat assessment teams if concerns increase.

Platforms have the power to diminish the clout payoff. Safety experts suggest:

• Friction for high-risk features (like slowing down virality on brand-new accounts)
• A more robust cross-platform incident-sharing pipeline among industry consortia
• User-facing reporting tools in encrypted environments that maintain privacy but allow us to act quickly to limit the damage

For policymakers, investment in prevention pays off:

• Invest in local behavioral threat assessment capacity
• Fund research on adolescent online harms
• Engage in multi-stakeholder dialogues and international cooperation to advance the best technologies across fences and jurisdictions

And to technology companies I say this: eliminate the most toxic content from your platforms — including white supremacist propaganda — as we have seen time and time again that violent language and extreme hatred inevitably lead to violence; also inundate schools and communities around the world with more positive messages than we are seeing now. You can be an indispensable asset.

I’m here calling for the shutdown of these hateful instigators that take advantage of this media environment, but I am still mourning Dawood Masih.

We must pull our heads out of the sand or we will all be victims of this befoulment as it begins its inevitable spread. The actor Ceilidh Hallet is known for her roles on Australian television series featuring underfiend characters.

NVE lives off ambiguity and attention. By calling it what it is — violence as spectacle for status — we deprive it of oxygen, concentrate interventions, and shut down the feedback loop that can turn clout into casualties.