Misanthropic Motivation: Europe's Struggle with Nihilistic Violent Extremism

Analysis

By Shreya Nautiyal

Nihilism is a philosophical belief that views life as meaningless and lacking any inherent meaning, purpose or objective significance. Accordingly, Nihilistic Violent Extremism (NVE) can be understood as a growing security threat that desensitises individuals to violence and normalises the banal acts of harm, driven by a generalised hatred of society or simply by an intent to engage in violent activities.

In light of this argument, the article seeks to examine the current threat of NVE facing Europe. It asks the pertinent question of why NVE is on the rise in Europe and how Europe is dealing with it. The question is of the essence because current policies are modelled on counter-radicalisation frameworks designed for ideologically consistent groups (grievance, recruitment, ideological conversions). In a nutshell, the current policies would fail to account for a teenager who livestreams an attack on a teacher, for the audience of five strangers in a Telegram chat. So far, this translates to the European states facing a rapidly mounting threat with strategies designed for a different one. The piece questions the motives behind this violence, asks what European digital infrastructure has to do with it, and explores whether existing child-protection and child-prevention mechanisms in Europe provide a good point of departure to tackle it.

The Council of the European Union defines NVE as the commitment of acts of violence not driven by an ideologically coherent goal, but by the apology of violence itself. EU Counter-Terrorism Coordinator Bartjan Wegter has described the phenomenon as “violence for the sake of violence.” In practice, it indicates a lack of ideological motivation in most cases, as well as an attempt to pursue fame and status within online communities.

In Europe, the phenomenon has been on the rise since the second half of the 2010s. It primarily involves the active engagement of minors and adolescents, who exhibit a heightened fascination with violence. They communicate predominantly through digital platforms, with the tangible outcomes of these interactions often manifesting in physical acts of violence.

Online Violent Subcultures and the Banality of Violence

Nihilistic Violent Extremism is characterised by the advocacy, glorification or facilitation of extreme violence, even though a coherent ideological intent may be missing. These violent acts can range from instances of self-harm, minor acts of vandalism, to even instances of mass violence. Therefore, NVE is rooted in a misanthropic worldview that reduces perpetrators’ sensitivity to violence. These perpetrators, mostly minors and adolescents, are organised in a decentralised but closely interconnected ecosystem of individuals and groups that operate across diverse digital spaces, including websites, social media platforms, forums, encrypted communication and gaming platforms. This ecosystem is commonly described through some of these infamous online subcultures, including The Com, 764, True Crime Community (TCC) and No Lives Matter (NLM), which primarily promote and facilitate sexual extortion, cybercrime, and offline violence, with different groups prioritising different forms of activity. These groups demonstrate a very fluid community and have achieved particular notoriety, especially in some European States.

The Com is an indistinct network of nihilistic groups targeting the youth through social media and online gaming platforms to engage in violent acts promoting self-harm, child abuse, sextortion and animal cruelty, by using extreme intimidation to push minors or young adults into taking extreme actions. The True Crime Community is a multifaceted online ecosystem centred around the consumption, discussion, fascination and behavioural emulation of violent acts. Similarly, 764, founded in 2021, and NLM are based on a similar premise, including pseudo-satanism.

The Changing Grammar of Violence in Europe

Youth radicalisation has assumed growing prominence as a formidable global security challenge.

Earlier discussions on terrorism focused mostly on growing right-wing extremism and teenage recruitment by the Islamic State (ISIS), but the threat has broadened.  This threat, like all other forms of radicalisation and extremism, is amplified by the threat of digital acceleration of unidentified data. Nihilistic violence conceives violence as both an end in itself as well as a means to it.

Instances of not-so-sporadic incidents in Europe

Italy. On 18 September 2026, a 13-year-old student attacked his teacher with pepper spray before stabbing her in Rome. The teen’s smartphone was connected to Telegram through which he allegedly tried to film the attack on a live video call. Further, on 25 March 2026, a 13-year-old school student in Bergamo seriously injured his French language teacher by stabbing her. The student was wearing a T-shirt with V for Vendetta on and attempted to film the attack on Telegram in a video lasting one minute and fifty-three seconds. Additionally, in an Instagram post a day before the attack, the teen posted about his intent to kill his teacher in his manifesto titled “The Final Solution,” containing NVE references, highlighting: “Since kids apparently don't understand what's right and wrong, I'll use this to my advantage: I can't go to prison, since in Italy the minimum age for criminal responsibility is 14, I can't even be tried, so I'll do what I've always wanted to do: kill her and anyone who tries to stop me.”

Sweden. In September 2024, a 14-year-old boy was charged with two separate stabbing incidents, which he had filmed and disseminated on a Telegram channel. In an unconnected incident, in January 2025, another 14-year-old boy was arrested for a knife attack on a 55-year-old woman in Boras, Sweden, which he had broadcast live on Discord. He was later found to be a part of the 764 network.

Finland. A 16-year-old boy stabbed 3 female pupils in school under the age of 15 in the Pirkkala region of Tampere, Finland. Prior to the attack, the accused teenager published a manifesto where he expressed his intent to use a knife on female pupils and the urge to do something “significant” and “exciting.”

Denmark. A report by Darksight Analytics highlights a concrete and tangible risk of Danish youth increasingly becoming a part of NVE online environments. It further highlighted multiple instances of self-harm among the young Danish population, alongside cases of individuals being coerced into committing suicide during livestreams, followed by the perpetrators’ public glorification of their actions..

Germany. In June 2025, a 20-year-old boy from Hamburg was accused of coercing a 13-year-old American boy into hanging himself during an online interaction, which resulted in the teenager's death. The accused was later identified as a leading member of the 764 group.

These instances are not isolated, rather they are interconnected through multiple digital platforms to boost one’s ego and are “often by the young people for the young people.” The 2026 European Union Terrorism Situation and Trend (EU TE-SAT) Report indicates that in 2025, 22 terrorist attacks were actually carried out, 20 were foiled, and 3 failed in 10 Member States, resulting in 6 fatalities, compared to 2024’s total of 58 attacks across 14 Member States with 13 fatalities. But arrests have been in reverse: the number of detentions for terrorism-related offences has increased in 21 member states from 449 in 2024 to 486 in 2025, rising for the third year in succession despite a drop in the number of attacks. Europol’s report also states that more than a quarter of the suspects arrested (for whom age was recorded) were under 18. From Europol’s perspective, radicalisation is shifting from ideology to online identity and belonging, a pattern that this piece has been exploring with the online subcultures. In other words, fewer attacks do not mean a lessening threat, but a changing threat that’s rapidly becoming more complex than the given categories developed to measure it.

Discussion

Scholars conventionally defined radicalisation in terms of young individuals on the fringes of society: the neglected, the marginalised and those failed by the state. However, I would question whether this criterion fits in the present case. Radicalisation, and more specifically youth radicalisation, is no longer confined to the social periphery. Although my analysis does not trivialise these causes, which might drive an individual to commit violent extremist acts; it is worth noting that the causes behind NVE’s could be entirely variable. It could be a sheer “hatred for the society” and a desire to “see it destroyed,” as argued by the United States’ Department of Justice or if nothing, then to enjoy the act and glorify it. However, listing a couple of causes would be downplaying the intensity of nihilism as a serious cause behind senseless violence. Thus, these cases should not be simply understood as conventional forms of ideological terrorism nor should be dismissed as ordinary adolescent deviance. This understanding of violence as adolescent deviance, especially, risks underestimating their seriousness while overlooking their networked structure, imitative dynamics, and performative logic.

A Subculture of Anonymity

Seeking anonymity online reduces the costs of offline escalation and identity revelation, thereby making online nefarious activities more lucrative. Secure apps and anonymous accounts can let a perpetrator create an entire violent identity with no links to an offline identity. The research on the Italian school attacks in the spring of 2026 revealed that the attackers had used English (not because English was easier for them to speak than Italian, but because it was the common language of the transnational online audience who were their target audience and whom they sought to please). In addition to connecting with a wider audience, the texts and online acts seemed performative, conveying an increasing sense of glory around the attackers’ actions. For example, using a skull mask during attacks, using symbolic rituals and visible destruction on livestreams, or simply staging digital footprints, including specific hand gestures or manifesto uploads.

Through such actions, violence becomes imaginable and communicable to an online audience. In practice, the ‘community’ to which the radicalising teenager is responsible is not necessarily the community around him or her in school or at home, but remains a diffused, anonymous group online, often with no accountability for encouraging/supporting the act.

Gamification of violence

Online communities often use gamification to turn violence into a scoreboard. Our understanding of violent extremism and its linkages with video gaming remains quite limited. Attacks are scored within The Com and within the surrounding subcultures, like the True Crime Community. Perpetrators and those who watch them have been documented using casualty notations (“+1,” “-1” and an accumulation of numbers that refer to the number of victims in mass-casualty attacks in previous videos). This is somewhat similar to a video game type of score. During his attack on the Sicilian school in May of 2026, the 12-year-old attacker wrote, “my biggest fear is not even getting -1” (meaning, not killing even one person). This translates to real life, where violence is not just experienced by the online world but also rewarded, ranked, and turned into a competitive feat, increasing the incentive to escalate, instead of just walking away.

European Response

In 2022, the European Commission adopted the European strategy for a Better Internet for Kids (BIK+) in order to improve age-appropriate digital services and protect against cyberbullying of children. BIK+ is a digital extension of the 2021 EU Strategy on the Rights of the Child, which aims to support children in vulnerable situations and normalise child participation in areas of governance which concern them. The BIK+ complements and supports the activities of the Digital Services Act (DSA) of the EU. Additionally, Thematic Area 5 of the EU Strategy on the Rights of the Child ensures that children can navigate and benefit from the digital environment, rather than succumbing to the injuries of the post-apocalypse of an online nihilistic society.

The DSA, on the other hand, prohibits the use of deceptive or manipulative interface designs, commonly referred to as dark patterns, and restricts profiling-based advertising directed at children across online platforms. Further, between June and July, 2026, Europol and the Spanish Intelligence Center for Counter-Terrorism and Organized Crime (CITCO) identified and flagged around 4,340 illegal URLs linked to ‘The Com’ which engaged in extremist propaganda.

Yet, according to an April 2026 study, internet penetration in Northern and Western Europe (comparatively industrially and economically developed) is around 96-98%, while in the Southern and Eastern states of Europe, the penetration stands around 93%, indicating that platform-level interventions will not reach the union evenly, even as they attempt to.

Further, one of the central pillars of the European Commission’s counterterrorism agenda ProtectEU is protecting people online, including, improving the handling of terrorist and other harmful online content, alongside monitoring extremist exploitation of gaming platforms and undertaking periodic evaluations.

The EU already has a child protection model in place that pushes for ‘integrated child protection systems,’ which is intrinsically linked to the prevention and protection from violence. The idea was first outlined in the Commission’s March 2021 EU Strategy on the Rights of the Child, which pledged to bring forward a dedicated initiative on integrated, cross-sectoral child protection systems: systems where school, families, law enforcement agencies, health services and child welfare agencies work around the child and not in silos. The model places the prevention of harm against children across the physical and digital environments, not as separate policy tracks, but including online harms and cyberbullying. It directly does not address NVE but lines up with an evolving trend that the Commission itself has identified, that the national child protection systems across the EU have traditionally been fragmented, with each system focusing on a distinct type of harm, which is ‘trafficking,’ ‘abuse,’ ‘poverty,’ ‘self-harm coercion,’ and ‘offline violence’ and only one authority overseeing the full sequence of events after an attack. NVE, however, is challenging this fragmented approach by potentially linking these harms in one pathway, in which a vulnerable youth may be groomed through a gaming platform, forced to create images, pushed to engage in self-harm, and finally pushed towards offline violence.

Thus, over the years, the EU has formed a multi-agency, non-ideological prevention scaffolding that NVE responses should draw on rather than reinvent.

Conclusion

NVE represents the ‘power’ of online spaces, which, in Max Weber’s words, represents the ability of an individual to impose their will upon others even in the face of resistance. In this regard, Robert A. Dahl’s assumption that “some people have more power than others” remains one of the most incontrovertible aspects of the human condition. It can therefore be concluded that Nihilistic Violent Extremism operationalises this dynamic through decentralised networks of online subcultures that intends to exercise a banal form of social power over vulnerable and socially isolated adolescents. These subcultures then expose them to violent content and potentially induce them to engage in similar acts that they would not otherwise have committed outside the influence of these ecosystems.

In this regard, online platforms play a pivotal role in countering abstract forms of violent nihilism. State authorities must strengthen cooperation with these platforms to identify the patterns of online radicalisation. However, such cooperation must be accompanied by proper accountability structures to ensure that platforms deliver on their obligations in relation to extremist content and activity. Further, cooperation must also facilitate and create mechanisms for vulnerable users to seek assistance while maintaining their right to privacy. The youth must be active participants in these initiatives, aiding in the creation of prevention strategies based on their experiences, vulnerabilities, and digital realities of today.

Disclaimer: This paper is the author's individual scholastic contribution and does not necessarily reflect the organization's viewpoint.