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Your child is messaging neo-Nazis on Discord, role-playing the Columbine shooting on Roblox, or making fan art of mass killers, and you have no idea. That is the pattern Matthew Turner, an emergency medicine physician at Hershey Medical Center, is now seeing in his pediatric ER, where parents bring in children after spotting a chat-message leak that exposes months of online radicalization. He discusses the KevinMD article “The true crime community is radicalizing kids online.” You’ll hear how the true crime community pulls kids as young as eight from casual interest into obsession, imitation, and sometimes real-world violence, with one 14-year-old going on to commit a mass shooting. You’ll learn which warning signs matter, why parental firewalls don’t work, and the named resources clinicians and parents can use right now, including Parents for Peace, the Prevention Practitioners Network, and the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. If you treat children or raise them, this conversation names a threat hiding inside platforms you already let them use.

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at kevinmd.com/podcast. Today, we welcome Matthew Turner. He’s an emergency medicine physician, and we’re going to talk about the article, “The True Crime Community Is Radicalizing Kids Online.” Matthew, welcome to the show.

Matthew Turner: Thank you, sir. It’s great to be here.

Kevin Pho: All right, so tell us a bit about yourself and how you got interested in the true crime community and why you decided to share what you found on KevinMD.

Matthew Turner: Yeah. I’m currently a third-year resident at Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, Pennsylvania. One of the things that really got me interested in this true crime community, our pediatric emergency department, it’s very popular. We have about 40,000 pediatric patients each year, and one of the things that we’ve started seeing, especially in the past several months, is a huge increase in radicalization in some of these patients.

We’ve started having parents bring in their children because they’ve been up to no good online. One specific example that really piqued my interest was a young boy. He had been doing a lot of messaging with neo-Nazis on Discord, and that got me really interested in this online ecosystem that’s starting to radicalize young children online.

So I looked into it more and more and I stumbled across the true crime community. So the true crime community, it’s this subsection of this nihilistic, violent extremism that we’re seeing more and more in radicalizing young children today. The 764 network is relatively well-known. It’s starting to break into the public consciousness.

That’s effectively a decentralized online network that focuses on child exploitation. But the true crime community really isn’t that well-known yet, which is a shame, because it’s starting to become more and more deadly and dangerous, and I think it’s really important as physicians we’re more aware of that and the impact that that could have on health in our communities.

Kevin Pho: So tell us a little bit more about the true crime community that we may not be aware of. Is it just stuff that you see on Dateline about these cases? So tell us exactly about how these pediatric patients are being exposed online to. What exactly are we talking about?

Matthew Turner: So the true crime genre itself is huge. I think something like half of all Americans have consumed at least some true crime content. Me personally, I love true crime, like podcasts like My Favorite Murder, those are great, highly entertaining. But there’s a very dangerous, very small section of this community that goes from being interested in true crime content to an obsession and a glorification of this content.

You can especially see this in really young participants in the community, oftentimes as young as eight ranging up to 12 years old. There’s a tendency in this community for participants, they go from being interested in killers to being obsessed with them to glorifying them, and that ultimately translates into this weird, unhealthy parasocial relationship where they’ll start to imitate the killer’s aesthetics.

They’ll start to dress in their clothing. They’ll start to directly reference Columbine in the way that they dress. They’ll make fan art. You’ll see AI-generated videos of mass shooters hanging out, stuff like that. And as that becomes more prevalent and as people get deeper and deeper into these spaces where they become more and more obsessed with certain killers, there’s like sections where people are really obsessed with Columbine.

There’s sections where people are really obsessed with the Charleston shooting. Eventually, that leads to a desire to imitate these killers and to gain clout within the community. So you’ll ultimately have one of these really young participants, one of the examples we mentioned in our article was only 14 years old, commit a mass shooting.

But ultimately, that influences other people in the community because they’ll want to imitate that by committing violence of their own, and it becomes more self-referential, this metastasis of violence that you can see all across thousands of miles in very different locations.

Kevin Pho: Now, what kind of platforms is this distinct sect of true crime, where are they found? I think you mentioned Discord earlier on. What are some common platforms that house this sect?

Matthew Turner: Unfortunately, it’s all of them. Pretty much every single social media site is really just infested with this sort of content. There’s been a lot of difficulties with moderation from big tech.

One of the worst places is actually the gaming industry, specifically Roblox. Actually on Roblox, which is very targeted towards a younger demographic, you’ll actually have people designing their own games where you can imitate previous mass shootings. There’s one where you could participate in the Uvalde shooting. There’s one where you could do a recreation of the Columbine shooting. And those are just absolute hubs of radicalization where people really get sucked into this community.

Kevin Pho: And you mentioned earlier there are pediatric patients as young as eight that are in these communities. How are they presenting in your emergency department?

Matthew Turner: A lot of the time, the parents are really unaware of what’s going on. It’ll just be what we call in the intelligence community a leak. Like, maybe they’ll notice something unusual. There’s some costs like an email or a chat message, and they’ll bring them into the emergency department, and that’s where if you dig a little deeper, you can really pull on the string and unravel this whole nest of what they’ve actually been doing online, what they’ve actually been consuming, who they’ve been talking to.

Kevin Pho: And what do you do next? So if an emergency physician encounters a situation like this, what are the various paths that can go down?

Matthew Turner: This is where it gets very difficult because the resources, there are more and more. There’s a lot of programs right now that are being started up and a lot of organizations that are working to address this.

Currently, we are somewhat limited. The first few cases that we saw, we’ve been typically forced to do like a referral to psychiatry, see if we can set them up with social work. But the good news and the thing that I really want to hammer home in this interview for any clinicians that are listening is that there are resources out there.

We have organizations like Parents for Peace. There’s something called the Prevention Practitioners Network at Eradicate Hate. That is a great resource for clinicians. There’s also resources such as the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. I also highly recommend looking into Dexter Ingram. He was one of the co-authors on this paper, and he has a lot of online resources for parents and clinicians online that can be very helpful.

Kevin Pho: Now, from your experience and research, when you talk to some of these pediatric patients and their families, just speculate, why do you think it’s appealing to some of them?

Matthew Turner: I think a large part of the appeal can come from just how ubiquitous this stuff is in some online spaces. Like I said, the true crime community, I mean, it’s everywhere. Everyone likes true crime. It’s huge right now. Like, some of the most popular shows on Netflix have been this true crime content. So it’s not really that unusual to be interested in this sort of thing, even at a young age.

I think it’s just easy just to find a space, especially if you’re lonely, you’re bored, you can just find a community where people accept you, and they want to talk to you, and you get more clout online just as you go deeper and deeper into this space.

Kevin Pho: And what are some options parents have? I know you did mention some resources. Is there a way they can talk to sometimes, and we’re talking about young children, right? But your young children, preteens, and teens about some of the content they’re consuming, specifically as it relates to true crime?

Matthew Turner: Yes. So I was actually just at a conference literally yesterday, and one of the things we discussed was if you’re a parent and you think that you know what your child is consuming online, you don’t. You absolutely don’t. They will always find a way around the firewall. They’ll always find a way to get around whatever protections you set up.

So really, I think the emphasis should be on just immunizing them, so to speak, talking with them ahead of time about the things that they might encounter online, making it very clear that if they see anything that makes them uncomfortable, if they feel that someone is trying to manipulate them or urge them into something that they don’t want to do, being able to have someone in their life that they can trust enough to talk to about that.

Kevin Pho: Now, you mentioned Roblox specifically. I’m certainly familiar with that. I have young children of my own. So for those who aren’t familiar with that environment and the potential danger it causes, just tell us a little bit about what Roblox is and why that platform specifically can be so insidious when it comes to influencing our young children.

Matthew Turner: Oh, absolutely. Roblox, that was a little after my time, but the way Roblox works, it’s effectively this massive online game overwhelmingly aimed at children, a very young demographic. And the way you can work in Roblox is you can make your own games and own servers within the wider game. So that means that it’s very easy to develop your own isolated communities within this online ecosystem, and that making an online isolated ecosystem where people are trapped, so to speak, in these very tight-knit communities makes it very easy for radicalization to spread, especially if you have games that are focused on really horrendous subjects like recreating mass shootings and that sort of thing.

Kevin Pho: Now, is there any responsibility on behalf of these companies to regulate this? If someone creates a game that replicates a mass shooting, that seems like a somewhat obvious thing to regulate.

Matthew Turner: Oh, yeah, I completely 100 percent agree. There has been some progress. I know for a fact that resources like the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism have been putting a lot more pressure on these big companies like Roblox to really moderate their content.

They’ve had more luck with the social media sphere. A lot of these game companies have really kind of dug in their heels, so to speak, and are pretty adamantly against moderating their content even more, which I think is a big shame, because if we’re able to just moderate that content even just a little bit more, I think you could have a world of good done from the prevention that could be caused by that.

Kevin Pho: Now, when it comes to radicalizing specifically on Roblox, like, how exactly does that occur? They’re playing a game. Is there, like, a chat function where they can type or talk to people directly? How does that radicalization happen?

Matthew Turner: Oh, absolutely. So there is a chat function. You can talk with people over Roblox. A large part of Roblox, they’ll actually have these servers where it’s like a role-playing game. There was one server, it was pretty famous a couple years ago. I believe that they were role-playing ancient Rome. So at first it started off, like, a bunch of people pretending, “Oh, I’ll be Augustus,” “I’ll be Caesar.”

But then it just becomes more insidious as people get more into these characters. It becomes more all-consuming. I think they ended up forming effectively a quasi-cult, because the role-playing and the blurring between real life just became so more and more insidious.

Kevin Pho: Now, from your research and experience, who are the people in general that are radicalizing?

Matthew Turner: So unfortunately, a lot of the radicalizing is actually coming from other pediatric patients. One of the things that we’re seeing with these online networks, specifically 764, is a lot of time victims become perpetrators. That’s the way the network is almost set up. So you might have someone maybe in their 20s or 30s who goes out of their way to victimize these minors, but then these minors go on to radicalize other ones. So sometimes you’ll have 16 and 17-year-olds radicalizing and targeting 8 to 12-year-olds, which I think is the most horrifying aspect of this whole thing.

Kevin Pho: And is there any movement in terms of breaking up some of these larger networks, or do they just simply metastasize and there’s too many of them? Is there any movement in terms of finding out who’s doing the majority of the radicalizing?

Matthew Turner: The good news is that there has been a big push by law enforcement against specifically 764 in general. It is a very large decentralized network. There’s something like 10,000 participants estimated with an estimated 100,000 victims. However, there have been hundreds of arrests in the last year alone, and 764, as we currently know it, is actually largely kind of disintegrating and starting to break up. The true crime community is one of these breakaway groups that we’re starting to see. So it’s likely in a couple years the landscape will be entirely different.

Kevin Pho: So speaking to the pediatricians who may be listening to you, and of course the parents, give us some signs that interest in true crime crosses over into something pathologic and glorifying true crime. What are some signs that we need to look out for?

Matthew Turner: That is an excellent question. I would say there’s no one sign specifically, but taken together as a constellation, it’s very important. So if you go from an interest in true crime to more of an obsession and an imitation, that’s where we’re starting to get in very dangerous waters. So something like engaging in fan art, starting to talk about these attackers and mass killers of the past in a sympathetic light, like, “Oh, they were victims lashing out against an unjust world.”

When children start to wear clothing that directly imitates prior attackers, Columbine, imitating the shirts that they wore is a huge red flag. Also other things to look out for, if your child is spending more and more time online, if they’re isolated, if they’re withdrawing, if they talk about people online that you’ve never met or never heard of, if they refer to only online friends, that is all stuff to watch out for as both parents and pediatricians.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Matthew Turner. He’s an emergency medicine physician, one of the co-authors of the article, “The True Crime Community Is Radicalizing Kids Online.” Matthew, let’s end with some take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience.

Matthew Turner: Take-home messages. For the clinicians out there, I want to let them know that there are a lot of resources, a lot more resources with each passing month that are coming out. I’d really like to highlight what Dexter Ingram is doing, as well as organizations like the Prevention Practitioners Network, Parents for Peace, the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, and the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.

For the parents, I’d just really like to emphasize, even if you can’t know everything that your child is doing online, it’s important to talk to them about this sort of thing, to give them an immunization against this sort of content, just so they can have some defenses going forward.

Kevin Pho: Matthew, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and insight. Thanks again for coming on the show.

Matthew Turner: Yeah, thanks for having me.