As physicians who regularly work with pediatric patients, and experts in counter-terrorism, we know firsthand the dangers that online radicalization poses to youth. Nihilistic violent extremism (NVE), which glorifies violence for the sake of violence, is on the rise globally. Many of these decentralized online networks, such as the 764 Network, specifically target children for recruitment. 764 has seen a sharp increase in popularity, and has become the subject of increased scrutiny from the U.S. government. While public awareness of 764 is increasing, the threat from similar agents in the online ecosystem remains critically underreported. Unfortunately, we have found that the majority of parents have never heard of 764, or similar radicalization networks operating on platforms that their children use daily, including Roblox, Discord, Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram.
However, while 764 is beginning to break into the public consciousness, one of the most underreported and rapidly growing threats can now be found in the true crime community (TCC).
The true crime genre is enormously popular. Podcasts such as My Favorite Murder average up to 19 million listeners a week, and a 2024 YouGov poll found that 57 percent of Americans consume true crime content. While true crime is not a new phenomenon, it has exploded in popularity over the past decade, aided by the large online communities that have formed around it. The self-identified TCC may be found on Discord, Telegram, X, and Tumblr, as well as on youth-oriented online forums including Roblox and TikTok. The typical age of TCC participants is often shockingly young, often between 13-18 years.
While the vast majority of TCC participants will display a benign and harmless interest in true crime, there is a dangerous tendency in the community to develop unhealthy parasocial relationships with both the victims and the perpetrators, ultimately resulting in increased negative feelings and a decline in overall well-being, as demonstrated in a recent Boston University study. Further progression into deeper levels of the TCC evolves from curiosity about perpetrators to glorification of them, often portraying them as sympathetic victims lashing out against an unjust world. TCC participants may become obsessed with prior perpetrators of mass attacks, with groups such as “Columbiners” coalescing in a fandom for the Columbine school shooters, or “Roofies” for fans of the 2017 Charleston shooter Dylann Roof. As radicalization within the TCC increases, TCC members sink into an online ecosystem that evolves from obsessively following the digital footprints of past perpetrators to fanfictions, art, and AI-generated videos on TikTok of mass shooters.
Curiosity leads to glorification leads to imitation. In the deeper levels of the TCC, participants often mimic the clothing and style of past perpetrators. Online games such as the massively popular Roblox feature servers such as “Active Shooter Studios”, which allow players to participate in digital recreations of Columbine or the Uvalde shootings.
It is this participatory aspect of the TCC, where adherents begin to see themselves as part of this “pantheon of death” that the community coalesces around, that is the most dangerous. One of the most notable recent examples is the 2024 Abundant Life Christian School shooting in Wisconsin. The perpetrator, 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow, fatally shot two victims and injured another six before taking her own life. Rupnow had been fascinated with the TCC for at least four years prior to the attack, and left behind a manifesto that included references to a 2007 mass shooting in Finland, a 2018 shooting in Crimea, and a mass stabbing in Turkey in 2024. Just prior to the attack, Rupnow uploaded an image to X of her hand forming the “OK” symbol over her combat boots on a tiled bathroom floor.
Rupnow’s addition to the TCC quickly made her a central figure within the online fandom and triggered multiple downstream effects. One month later, one of her followers on X, a 17-year-old student who had urged Rupnow to “Livestream it” when she uploaded her final image, murdered another student at his high school in Nashville. Just a few months later, a shooter at Evergreen High School in Colorado uploaded an image imitating Rupnow, while also wearing a t-shirt labeled “Wrath” in a reference to the 1999 Columbine shooting. Still another attack occurred in November 2025 at a high school in Indonesia when a 17-year-old student detonated several explosives. His social media directly referenced Rupnow’s “OK” image, with hashtags that included #tcc and #teeceecee, and he carried several replica rifles with references to shootings at Columbine, Christchurch, and other attacks with him.
All this serves to demonstrate the memetic, self-referential nature of the TCC. Violence metastasizes in clusters from TCC attacks, as other TCC participants seek to achieve similar notoriety in this ecosystem, often by tying themselves into the wider TCC pantheon. In this international network, geography and ideology do not matter. Only the act of performative violence, and inserting oneself into the wider TCC mythos, matters.
The increasing danger that the TCC poses to public health cannot be overstated. TCC-linked violence is on the rise globally. Victims have been as young as eight years old when they were first exposed. It is imperative that parents be aware of the severe risk that this online community poses to their children. These networks operate without borders or ideology. Only the performance of violence matters. The Indonesia attacker referenced an American school shooting, a New Zealand mosque attack, and a Wisconsin teenager he had never met. No single government can monitor, interdict, or disrupt these pipelines effectively on its own. Meaningful prevention requires coordinated action between governments and platforms across jurisdictions, and that conversation is long overdue. For their part, physicians should be aware of the threat that the TCC poses to public health and include it as part of their routine screening. The sooner that the wider public becomes aware of the dangers posed by the TCC, the more lives that can be saved.
Matthew Turner is an emergency medicine physician at Penn State Milton S. Hershey Hospital in Hershey, Pennsylvania. His scholarship spans emergency medicine, military medicine, infectious disease, medical history, and the intersection of medicine with warfare and public health. He has authored more than 35 peer-reviewed publications, with work appearing in Cureus, Military Medicine, the Emergency Medicine Journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases, the American Journal of Neuroradiology, and other journals.
Dr. Turner has long been interested in the intersection of medicine and history, with publications examining historical disease outbreaks, biological and chemical warfare, ancient pathology, toxicology, and military medical lessons. His work has explored topics ranging from yellow fever and anthrax as possible tools of biological warfare to the medical legacy of historical figures such as Akhenaten, Henry I, Justinian II, and Dominique-Jean Larrey. He also writes about the evolving world of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, including modern conflict medicine and the use of chemical weapons by violent non-state actors. Professional updates are available on LinkedIn.
Stephen Sandelich is an emergency physician. Dexter Ingram is a national security consultant.
