Violence without a ‘why’ — a shocking online terror network reaches South Africa

Last week marked 25 years since the 9/11 attacks in the US, an anniversary steeped in the usual solemnity, and a nation’s grief still being processed a generation later. Alongside that remembrance, the anniversary is also a moment to ask what terrorism actually looks like today. The honest answer is that the threat landscape has changed compared to 2001, and South Africa is no longer watching from a safe distance.

In late August, a 16-year-old in the Western Cape was reportedly arrested for accessing, possessing and facilitating the distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). South African Police Service (SAPS) intelligence had linked the teenager to 764 – a decentralised online network the FBI has classified as a tier-one domestic terrorism threat, and which Canada formally designated a terrorist entity in December 2025. 

The investigation found no political manifesto, no religious grievance, no cause a 20th-century counterterrorism analyst would recognise. Among several child victims, investigators found a group chat, a set of dares, and children coercing their peers into filming their own abuse for status inside a community that rewards cruelty for its own sake.

This is nihilistic violent extremism, or NVE – a term still new to most public conversation. Research shows that NVE is a very fast-growing form of extremism that targets children and young people online, globally.

Violence for the sake of violence

So, what is nihilistic violent extremism? The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a UK-based think tank, defines nihilistic violence simply: violence with no ideology behind it. No cause. Just a hatred of people in general. The European Union's counter-terrorism coordinator put it even more plainly last week: “It’s violence for the sake of violence.” There’s no link to any political or religious belief. Instead, the violence is about something else entirely: status. Hurting someone, or getting someone else to hurt themselves, earns you respect in an online group.

This “status over ideology” pattern is what makes NVE so hard to counter. Existing counterterrorism frameworks were built to track propaganda and disrupt a coherent worldview, but NVE offers almost nothing to grab hold of. These groups borrow symbols from all over – swastikas, jihadist imagery, slogans worn by school shooters – not because members believe in Nazism or jihadism, but because of their shock value and that they are instantly recognisable.

ISD’s research backs this up: explanations or motivations, when they surface, come after the violence, not before, and they serve to make the act seem purposeful. The truth appears to be simpler and darker: the shock value is the point. The cruelty is the point. There seems to be nothing else behind it.

How it actually works

The broad NVE ecosystem researchers call “the Com” (short for “the Community”) is not a single organisation, but a constantly shifting web of chats, servers and channels spanning Discord, Telegram, Roblox and mainstream platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Its most disturbing strand is sextortion: networks like 764 that trick or threaten children into hurting themselves, sending sexual images, or hurting other people.

Rene Mattheus, a South African cybercrime attorney, describes how Com operators build rapport with children on gaming platforms, then turn hostile once they have compromising material: “Once the child trusts the extortioner ... they start manipulating them, asking to send photos.” 

From there, the threats start: “Send more, or we'll expose you”, pushing children toward worse acts: hurting themselves, a pet, or a friend, all filmed and shared. A Belgian official calls this “gamification”, which means that members earn points for talking someone else into harm, and for filming the proof. The line between victim and perpetrator is often meaningless, meaning a child coerced into abuse one week may be coercing someone else the next.

This isn’t confined to obscure corners of the internet. Italy saw a string of NVE-linked school attacks in 2026, including a livestreamed stabbing and an attempted stabbing by a 12-year-old wearing a helmet covered in the names of mass shooters. Researchers called it a “mimetic chain”: each attack inspired the next, driven not by shared ideology but by a shared fandom for mass killers.

Why this, why now

This kind of network could not exist at this scale without every teenager having such ready internet access. But access alone doesn’t explain why “cruelty-for-clout” has become a compelling identity for some young people. 

Researchers applying Arie Kruglanski’s Significance Quest Theory argue the appeal lies in status and meaning-making among young people who feel they have neither, and find themselves searching for significance amid climate anxiety, falling trust in institutions, and a pandemic-shaped adolescence. 

As Belgian radicalisation expert Christophe Busch puts it: “Some young people feel the world has gone to the dogs. The only thing they feel they can do is speed that up.” Worryingly, Belgium’s national threat assessment body says this is now reaching children as young as eight, “because genuinely young children do not have the capacity to tell right from wrong yet. That is exactly what is being exploited,” Busch explains.

How to detect NVE

Once a threat like this becomes visible, people tend to see it everywhere. Experts who research NVE caution strongly against the instinct to treat every teenager’s dark joke, every doomer meme, every fascination with true crime as a five-alarm warning sign. 

They distinguish between two categories of behaviour. The first is ordinary transgressive humour – such as bleak jokes and edgy aesthetics – which are the kind of boundary-testing common among teenagers, and as such are not a crisis. The second is when that aesthetic starts combining with real warning behaviour: fixation on a specific past attacker, identifying with them, or talk of a timeline, a target, or a plan.

So, what specifically should prompt this concern? Threat-assessment specialists point to a few signs: a child who withdraws sharply from friends and family; who adopts new, obscure symbols without explaining them; who moves conversations onto platforms parents can't see, particularly Discord servers or gaming chats with strangers; who shows sudden, intense admiration for mass shooters or serial killers, rather than mere curiosity; or who casually shares gore or extremely violent content, suggesting they've grown desensitised to it. While none of these signs necessarily indicate an adoption of NVE, when displayed, especially alongside secrecy about online life, they're worth taking seriously.

A different kind of terrorism

Twenty-five years ago, terrorism regularly operated as a movement with a leader, a stated grievance, and a target chosen to make a political point. The threat of NVE, which is now recruiting children through various online spaces, lacks these features – making it difficult to anticipate. 

It has no manifesto to debunk, no leader to capture, no political demand a government could ever meet, because it isn’t asking for anything except an audience. It found its constituency not among the ideologically committed, but among children who are already anxious, isolated, and searching for purpose. NVE it is not confined to Europe or the United States. It is already here, and South Africa currently has no national strategy, and little public conversation, to meet it.

The response this issue demands is specific: parents and teachers who know what a 764 and “the Com” aesthetic looks like before they encounter it in their own child’s bedroom, platforms held to a consistent standard rather than a patchwork of guidelines, and a South African policy conversation that starts now, rather than after this country produces a case study of its own. DM

Isel van Zyl is a researcher and project manager specialising in violent extremism, conflict, and human security. Dr Callum Jones is a research associate in criminology at Deakin University in Australia.