The rise of “0 to 100” killers who go from watching torture, mutilation and beheading videos in their bedrooms to committing murder suggests there could be a link between extreme violence online and in real life, experts have said.
Criminal justice experts advocated a new approach, inspired by counter-terrorism, to identify an emerging type of murderer with no prior convictions, after cases such as Nicholas Prosper, who killed his mother and siblings and planned a primary school massacre.
Jonathan Hall, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said there was a “new threat cohort” combining terrorists who were radicalised online and those who had “gone down a rabbit hole and into a dark world”.
He said: “There are quite a lot of similarities: they are isolated loners, boys rather than girls; the internet is obviously central; quite a high proportion have neurodivergence.
“People watching torture, mutilation, and beheading videos for entertainment” is probably not the place to be taring the scale. That’s already pretty fucked up, in my book. Like, easily already at 50 and cruising higher at a rapid rate.
Yeah, but the people who do go on to do that shit, would be the most likely to seek it out, and history shows people still would do those crimes without online video.
And a non zero were given treatment because those videos leave a trail and some get caught.
The answer to this stuff is rarely simple, and the actual findings are often counterintuitive.
Basically:
We have no idea until we study, and we can’t really ethically study this. We’d have to force a control group of impressionable kids to watch those videos.
I think I get what you are saying, but also, I’m not sure my point got across entirely. The article and headline use this “from 0 to 100” verbiage to imply a rapid acceleration from being at rest (as in, 0mph) to suddenly moving at a very high velocity (100mph). And that is relating people who watch snuff films to the at-rest part of the analogy, no effort spent, just coasting along… a default state, if you will. And, of course, the real wacko ones that end up just happening to take it a bit too far are the ones that just suddenly find themselves going 100mph, having obviously had to expend a great deal of energy in pursuit of that sudden delta-v.
I’m saying, on that kind of a scale, the people that would never even consider the existence of smut and, upon hearing about it, would be far too revolted to want to have to see it, has a velocity so far in the negative that it’s probably worth considering setting the 0 in the scale to the people who are all the way on the smut-is-gross-and-also-a-red-flag end of the dichotomy on this issue? That’s got to make more sense than setting 0 at “they watch that nasty shit but don’t, like, act on it” as the 0-point, doesn’t it?
The problem is in at-least 3 parts:
desensitization, AND feeding real psychopathy/sadism, AND normalizing such things…
moving the entire bell-curve is the problem.
or changing its shape…
People don’t accept that murder is a form of expression, same as speech is…
Within your body, your immune-system, if it is working-properly, disallows the expression of cancer, pathogens, & parasites, right?
But people hold that it is possible to have a country who is healthy, which doesn’t disallow the expression of moral-cancer, moral-pathogens, & moral-parasites, of course…
( “nobody has ANY right to restrict ANY expression, even treason, even murder! it’s a RIGHT” would be a too-accurate simplification of many ideologues’ won’t-think “muscle” )
Exemption-from-accountability/exemption-from-responsibility, aka corruption, is all it really is.
tired of being gaslit, but that’s all that’s left, in this world, it seems.
( btw, I’m not attacking your perspective: you’re right. Anybody already doing human-butchery-for-entertainment is somebody who needs to be found & limited/mitigated, before the “indulge” in butchering somebody.
I’m just getting these points into this page of discussions, to get the perspective recorded, is all…
There’s a yt channel, LADbible I think it’s called, & for some reason they’ve got some good in-depth interviews of, e.g. a woman who hunts the guys who destroy women’s lives for kicks…
She set-up the equivalent-to the FBI’s personality-profiling unit, in the UK…
Please watch that video, because what she tells us about stalkers, that they have MUCH higher liklihood of murdering ( something like 1/8 of 'em murder their victim? waaay too high, that ), & therefore stalking NEEDS to be considered to be a life-threat at that level…
I wish the Good Guys were winning, in this world, but it’ll take years to put the balance back, for some portion of the world, now…
but the alternative is to simply lose the world…
here: I think this is it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JrvWPGRnUwk
How can we support her & others doing the same kind of work?
we need clearer government, for 1 thing…
anyways, such are dangerous, & feeding their sickness does have consequences…
that’s what we’ve got to find the spine to correct.
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This is based on speculation.
Based on the observations in article itself, many people have watched horrific videos and have not gone on to commit any crimes.
Wilson said that for the past five years he had asked 300 first-year criminology students to raise their hand if they had watched a beheading video online. “All of them have,” he said, adding that this prevalence was reflected in an increase in these crimes.
Yeah, this passage in particular was a bit of a head scratcher. Like, you could pick any societal change since the adoption of the internet and say the same thing. If anything it indicates the opposite.
the measured change-in-behavior of recruits, through the decades, is real,
& it is the realistic-simulation-of-murder which is most-effective in creating populations who easily murder.
https://www.amazon.com/Assassination-Generation-Aggression-Psychology-Killing-ebook/dp/B01922I1U2/
I know that that measurement of actual-behavior is in the beginning of that book, & if they’ve got the spine to stand on actual-fact, instead of ideology, then it’d be a much better place to look, than would ideology, for people with intellectual-integrity/scientific-integrity.
“On Killing” & “Things They Cannot Say” also are on-topic, though less-directly, ttbomk.
https://www.amazon.com/Killing-Psychological-Cost-Learning-Society-ebook/dp/B00J90F8W2/
https://www.amazon.com/Things-They-Cannot-Say-Soldiers-ebook/dp/B0089LOKE4/
Back in WW1, it was damn-near impossible to get new soldiers to actually shoot another person.
Nowadays? Mass-shootings are a form of “sport” among some cultures.
Yes, that is actual significant-change in psychology & behavior, & yes, it does have a cause, as the Assassination Generation book is on.
Here are some actual-numbers:
https://www.thetrace.org/2024/12/data-gun-violence-shooting-stats-america/
( only 500 mass-shootings in the US, last year! improvement! )
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I guess you missed this part … “quite a high proportion have neurodivergence”
It’s simply pointing to the fact that many of the predominately male mass murderers are neurodivergent.
Stop comparing those on the outer edges of the bell curve with those who make up the body of the bell.
What does neurodivergent mean to you because there is range of divergent behaviors.
Exactly. The range goes from ADHD or autism to FAS or epilepsy.
Ok, I took you as saying that neurodivergent was a good signal but yeah it’s 15-20% of the population.
It’s less specific than other factors such as being an adolescent male which is a stronger signal but also not a requirement.
It actually looks like lonliness with some disconnect from society is the strongest signal. And that’s why actual research should been done rather than some random speculative report full of personal biases.
My knee-jerk take is that this is violence in video games part two, electric boogalo. But reading the article, goddam have all of you guys seen beheading videos? I’m too sensitive for that stuff and learned that lesson on rotten.com.
In a book I just read the protagonist cautions his son that once something is in your head, it’s impossible to get it out. And I think that’s great advice.
once something is in your head, it’s impossible to get it out.
As a method of harm reduction (as it’s impossible to eliminate this kind of violence), we should really be working to change the messaging. “Board rooms, not classrooms.”
My ex was into watching people die. I didn’t know about it being a explicit thing he searched for until a couple years into dating. I found out because he showed me two videos of people being shot in the head, and when I asked him why he did that he said, “I didn’t think these were that bad, they lived”. Less than a year later he started following me around the house cocking his weapons and pointing them at me or my dog. I think I’m lucky I got out
You think??? You dodged a goddamn bullet right there.
I’ve seen a couple of things that I wish I hadn’t, but I never opened a link to a beheading video. That was definitely one line I wasn’t willing to cross.
Having nothing to live for and feeling you have nothing to lose is a bigger contributor.
There are so many people feeling like that who don’t commit any crimes. What makes you think that’s the main factor?
I never said main factor, I said bigger contributor.
Is this the same thing they said about comic books, video games, and rap lyrics?
