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.
“We have to be stark about this – this behaviour couldn’t have existed without the internet because it is the source of the idea that certain types of violence are the solution.”
Hall is writing a report for the Home Office that was commissioned after the Southport attack, looking at whether to treat mass-casualty attack planning as terrorism.
He disagreed with stretching the definition of terrorism, but added: “The question is what lessons can you learn from the management of one cohort to apply to the other.”
David Wilson, an emeritus professor of criminology at Birmingham City University, said research into whether online violence led to violence in real life was an “emerging field”.
Although earlier research challenged previous generations’ moral panic over violence in video games and films, Wilson thought that social media was different because it was more absorbing, was consumed alone, and algorithms led people to content that became “more and more extreme”.
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.
He observed the rise of “0 to 100” killers, who diverged from the norm of offences escalating gradually and instead moved straight to murder. This was connected to the rise of “mixed ideology” motives, which included “incel” culture, the “alt-right” and mass-killing manifestos. The problem was compounded by cuts to youth clubs and mental health provision, he said.
Greg Stewart, a criminal lawyer and former youth justice lead for the Law Society, said successful reforms to the youth justice system picked up youngsters behaving badly in communities but missed “exceptional children”.
“The escalator, which was the old way of looking at things, has been disabled, so you’re more likely to go from a low base to very high seriousness,” he said, adding that there was an overlap between autism, obsessive behaviour and becoming radicalised online.
He recommended a Prevent-style response, in which teachers and lecturers picked up “thinking patterns and views”. For example, Nasen Saadi, who stabbed a woman, alarmed a lecturer by asking questions about murder.
Julia Davidson, a professor of criminal justice and cybercrime at the University of East London, said there was a “huge body of evidence” on young people’s exposure to violent content, which she feared had become a “public health problem”, though “the science is difficult” in establishing a link with offline violence.
Young people felt pressure “to watch violent acts and it being a test of belonging to a group” and this dovetailed with the toxic masculinity promoted by influencers such as Andrew Tate, she said.
Davidson said conversations in 2017 over the Online Safety Act, which required platforms to prevent children from seeing harmful content, originally focused on child sexual abuse, cyberbullying and pornography, but police were sharing growing concerns about online violence – for example, in the Olly Stephens murder case.
Almudena Lara, the Ofcom policy director for child safety, agreed that children were subject to a “perfect storm of violent content, content that promotes abuse and hate, and often very misogynistic content and pornographic content, all being fed to them in a way that almost makes it unavoidable”.
Ofcom is seeking to balance freedom of speech with child safety, and requires platforms not to proactively push violent content to children, though Lara said “the bar is not complete elimination” but rather tackling the “cumulative impact” that was linked to “attitudes towards real-life violence”.
Prof Lorna Woods, a legal adviser to the Online Safety Act Network, said she feared that self-regulation by social media platforms was “not going to be enough” to tackle the problem, particularly where it relied on content takedowns, and platforms must instead move towards safety by design.
