Last week, a 23-year-old opened hearth exterior a church at a Minneapolis Catholic faculty, killing two youngsters and injuring 19 different individuals earlier than dying by suicide. Just some hours later, the shooter’s YouTube movies started to flow into on-line. In a single, the shooter reveals off an arsenal of weapons and ammunition laid out on a mattress. The killer laughs and affords a stream-of-consciousness monologue. “I didn’t ask for all times,” they are saying, the digital camera targeted on the shooter’s vape. “You didn’t ask for demise.”
The video generated loads of consideration, largely because of the photographs and phrases that the shooter had inscribed on weapons and journal circumstances: racial slurs, random expletives, and the names of not less than 13 different killers. There have been references to Waco and Ruby Ridge in addition to BlackRock and ExxonMobil. One of many weapons says Launch the recordsdata! An ammo journal is scrawled with kill Donald Trump; one other says I’m the woker, child, why so queerious. There are a number of references to memes: Widespread phrases like skibidi seem, as does “Lenny Face”—( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)—and an especially area of interest allusion to a internet comedian from 2008. Taken collectively, the messages are incoherent. That is irony-poisoned nihilism, tactical gear as shitposting—the one trigger this particular person appears to have is to troll the viewer.
And it labored. The video was picked aside by individuals on the lookout for some hints as to the shooter’s motivation or politics. Some right-wing influencers and MAGA-friendly information shops seized on the killer’s gender id, insinuating that the capturing had one thing to do with them being trans. Others fixated on the message about killing Trump and steered the killer was a deranged liberal. Some left-leaning commentators seized upon the anti-Semitic scrawlings and racial slurs and mentioned the killer was clearly a neo-Nazi.
However the rush to make sense of the capturing primarily based on these messages and symbols is misguided. As incoherent, unhinged, and even cringey because the Minneapolis shooter’s movies may appear, they’re a part of a well-recognized template of terroristic habits—one which continues to unfold in on-line communities devoted to mass shootings and different types of brutality. In these morbid areas, killers are considered as martyrs, they usually’re dubbed “saints.” Actually, they’re influencers.
These disaffected communities stay on social networks, message boards, and personal Discords. They’re populated by trolls, gore addicts, and, after all, aspiring shooters, who examine, debate, and reward mass-shooting techniques and manifestos. Regularly, these teams undertake the aesthetics of neo-Nazis and white supremacists—generally as a result of they’re earnestly neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and generally as a result of it’s the look and language that they’re cribbing from elsewhere. It’s at all times blurry, nevertheless it normally quantities to the identical factor. In an article printed by this journal final yr, Dave Cullen, writer of the e-book Columbine, summed all of it up: “As you learn this, a distraught, lonely child someplace is considering an assault—and the one group they belief is screaming, Do it!”
Authorities haven’t launched data as as to if the Minneapolis shooter was energetic in these on-line communities. Nonetheless, the shooter did seem like collaborating in what may solely be described as a fandom: One among their weapons accommodates a direct reference to the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook Elementary capturing.
To know the dynamics at play right here, I spoke at size with Alex Newhouse, a researcher on the College of Colorado at Boulder who research on-line extremism. He advised me that the “proximate purpose of those assaults is to entrench the shooter within the broader legacy of violence and propel the legacy additional.” The concept, in different phrases, is to encourage another person to change into a shooter—by making a public manifesto, leaving a path of digital proof, and even livestreaming assaults in some circumstances. “The extra steadily the template reveals up, the extra probably it can repeat,” Newhouse mentioned. “It’s not ideological within the sense that we have a tendency to consider it. There could also be anti-Semitic or fascistic parts therein, however the true incentive is the self-reinforcing legacy of those shooters.”
For that motive, Newhouse calls these teams “mass-shooter-creation machines.”
Tlisted below are many various networks of terror on-line, all with a constellation of differing ideologies, although lots of them overlap. There’s the Terrorgram Collective, whose leaders have been final yr indicted by the Division of Justice “for soliciting hate crimes, soliciting the homicide of federal officers, and conspiring to offer materials assist to terrorists.” One other group is recognized because the True Crime Neighborhood, or TCC, which is a set of customers that grew partly out of the “Columbiners” group—these are followers of mass shooters and serial killers.
Generally, these teams overlap with different violent networks, together with those who site visitors baby pornography and goal and exploit weak minors into slicing or in any other case hurting themselves. Because the extremism researchers Jean Slater and Ry Terran wrote earlier this yr, these teams, in addition to right-wing youth subcultures, have blended collectively right into a diffuse, “hybrid risk community.” What this implies is that customers from all these fringe subcultures—individuals from Terrorgram, mass-murder fan teams, individuals seeking to groom youngsters, trolls—are interacting throughout public social networks and personal chat communities. These people might not all share the identical pursuits, but they’re fellow vacationers on lots of the worst areas on the web. Slater and Terran name this unfastened community the “Soyjak Attacker Video Fandom,” named partly after a message board began by 4chan customers. This community, they write, “is greatest understood as a fandom or subculture; it has no official membership or leaders. The fandom goes past merely admiring mass attackers, and is actually an energetic and participatory subculture.”
That is all meant to be impenetrable to outsiders, which is one motive for the confusion that follows shootings such because the one in Minneapolis. However the dynamics are acquainted: There are in-jokes, lore, and, most significantly, actual individuals making an attempt to impress their perceived friends. For example, in January, the Wisconsin Heart for Investigative Journalism and ProPublica reported that two youngsters who carried out separate shootings in Madison, Wisconsin (December 2024), and Nashville, Tennessee (January 2025), crossed paths on-line and frequented lots of the similar areas devoted to glorifying and discussing mass killings. The report notes that the Nashville killer praised the Madison shooter on-line as a “saintress” and boasted on-line that he “was mutuals with somebody who’s now an actual faculty shooter ;-).”
Once more, all of this confounds conventional makes an attempt at sense making. “A lot of the killers’ legacy is constructed upon the dependability of particular person shooters being handled as puzzles to resolve and other people to grasp,” Newhouse advised me. “The response—by the media, by researchers, by politicians—to dig into these people and kind it into one thing we are able to wrap our heads round may be very human, nevertheless it helps maintain this cycle.”
The issue is just not that media protection or makes an attempt at rationalization essentially glorifies the shooter, however that it directs consideration towards the shooter. That folks could be falling for the Minneapolis shooter’s scribblings and raging at one another over potential motivations is probably going thrilling to potential copycat killers—proof that the troll nonetheless works. We will hyperlink to the publish nonetheless however summarize ourselves: As one extremism researcher posted final week, the purpose of those assaults is to affix the lineage of mass shooters and for the subsequent killer to inscribe their identify on a gun earlier than an assault.
What is chilling about this still-novel model of extremist violence is that it weaponizes one of many web’s biggest items: the power for small teams of like-minded individuals to seek out one another and construct group.
To counter this dynamic, Newhouse thinks lawmakers, these in control of information protection, and even onlookers ought to redirect consideration away from particular person perpetrators. As a substitute, they need to give attention to how mass shootings are a social drawback pushed by networks and communities. Addressing the issue would imply tackling the loneliness and alienation that trigger individuals to hunt out or fall into these on-line areas. It could require actual adjustments to firearm entry. It could imply discovering methods to counter the degradation of actual, bodily communities that lead individuals to retreat to the digital world, and it might imply anticipating tech corporations such because the infamously permissive Telegram to take a extra energetic function in halting the recruitment of youngsters into harmful teams. There are not any politically simple or quick options.
However the scenario is just not hopeless. Close to the top of our dialog, Newhouse provided an attention-grabbing comparability for the networked phenomenon of the fashionable, on-line mass shooter: ISIS. In 2015, Twitter started conducting mass-deletion campaigns of suspected ISIS accounts, considerably disrupting the group’s organizing and recruiting. When ISIS moved to extra non-public networks, a gaggle organized by Europol labored with 9 know-how platforms and repair suppliers, together with Telegram, to establish and droop ISIS accounts and jihadist content material. Eighty-nine international locations and establishments, together with the USA, have joined a “International Coalition” to struggle ISIS, which continues to monitor digital exercise and monetary transactions to fight the fear group. “There are indicators all through the final 20 years that you may disrupt well-resourced established networks to make them much less prolific, nevertheless it requires an excessive quantity of presidency and company coordination,” Newhouse mentioned.
As for the media, within the aftermath of the Minneapolis capturing, I went again and reread Columbine. I used to be haunted by the passages that chronicled the mass media’s response to the capturing. In a rush to grasp the tragedy and feed a hungry viewers, their reporting helped unfold rumors—that the killers have been goths, that they focused jocks and minorities, or that they have been homosexual. A few of these mistruths portrayed the killers as outcasts and, crucially, victims. Others incorrectly said that the killers had executed their plan to perfection. In actuality, they botched their assault horribly. Their bombs by no means went off, and the pair died, based on Cullen, as “depressing failures.”
However greater than 26 years later, these mischaracterizations endured, changing into foundational lore for younger individuals who wish to observe within the killers’ footsteps. The cycle that Columbine helped kick off has developed right into a subculture that’s darkish, unwieldy, and sturdy. Sure, it’s an outgrowth of sick people, damaged coverage, and a nation brimming with firearms, but in addition of a tradition that refuses to be taught classes from previous tragedies. To interrupt this nightmarish cycle, each little bit of it has to vary.
