AILSA CHANG, HOST:
As parents wrestle with questions over screen time for their kids, law enforcement agencies have been raising another concern. The FBI office in Richmond, Virginia, posted a public service announcement for parents and educators on social media.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Violent online groups are targeting minors, coercing them into committing unspeakable acts against themselves, other children and even animals.
CHANG: It's a growing global phenomenon that crosses into both child exploitation and terrorism. NPR domestic extremism correspondent Odette Yousef reports. And a warning to listeners - in the next seven minutes, this story will discuss suicide and self-harm.
ODETTE YOUSEF, BYLINE: When Dana's 14-year-old son was hospitalized last year, she finally began to understand how strangers online had led him to the point of self-harm and repetitive thoughts of suicide.
DANA: The whole time period that he was into these things online, it was like he was taken hostage and brainwashed.
YOUSEF: NPR is not using Dana's full name because her son is still a minor. Her son was going through a rough patch at the beginning of ninth grade. There were big shifts in his social and family life, so he sought belonging online. He found forums where users shared his musical tastes. But in those same spaces, there were people affiliated with networks that prey upon kids.
DANA: They get you to follow these different accounts and view these different websites, and the algorithms just help that process along.
YOUSEF: The sites that Dana's son started frequenting completely changed his perception of the world around him. They were gore websites. They featured graphic imagery of real-life and AI-generated violence.
DANA: And it creates where you're so flooded with this content, it desensitizes you to violence.
YOUSEF: And it changed his personality. Dana says the happy kid she'd been raising with musical ambitions became very dark.
DANA: He was talking a lot about there was no meaning to anything. It was hopeless. Everything was meaningless. There was no purpose. And that was, again, very unlike him.
YOUSEF: Dana came to learn that her son was being influenced online by groups that the FBI now calls nihilistic violent extremist networks. These are decentralized networks of people online across many countries. They seek out vulnerable kids, make them feel accepted, then inculcate them with a sense of nihilism and a desire to gain respect online by engaging in self-harm or harm of others.
DANA: It's a form of coercive control. It's that drip, drip, drip. And you don't realize how bad it is until maybe you're out of it.
YOUSEF: The most notorious of these networks are called 764 and CVLT, but there are others. Predators in these networks are known to coerce children into sending them explicit photos or videos. They solicit images of kids harming themselves and others. In the U.S., they've been linked to some school shootings, and in other countries, kids are also falling victim to the influence of these groups.
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CARLY ROBINSON: RCMP have arrested an Edmonton area teen on suspicion of terrorism.
YOUSEF: In Canada, a 15-year-old was recently accused of plotting a terrorism offense in connection with these networks. In May, a free Lady Gaga concert at Copacabana Beach in Brazil was nearly the site of a bomb attack.
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MIMI SWABY: A plot they say had been orchestrated by a group promoting hate speech and the radicalization of teenagers.
YOUSEF: And teens in Sweden have been arrested for live-streaming attacks on random elderly victims.
WILLIAM BRANIFF: It's much larger than Americans understand.
YOUSEF: William Braniff is former head of the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships. It's part of the Department of Homeland Security. CP3, as it's called, works with local communities to take a public health approach to preventing terrorism and targeted violence. Braniff says by the time he left that post in March, nihilistic violent extremism had become the No. 1 concern.
BRANIFF: We see the one or two school shootings in the news and we think, oh, that's a tragic incident. What we don't see is the iceberg below the waterline.
YOUSEF: Work began during the Biden administration to better define and address this growing problem. Some of that has continued under the Trump administration. Since 2021, about a dozen people have been arrested in the U.S. for their predatory activities. The FBI wouldn't speak to NPR for this story, but in a statement, it says it's pursuing 250 investigations involving these networks. But counterextremism researchers agree that law enforcement alone won't solve it.
MATTHEW KRINER: This has grown beyond that original core network. And it's a very scary proposition to think about because what we're really talking about here is this network has gained its own life.
YOUSEF: Matthew Kriner heads the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism. He has testified as an expert in federal cases involving these networks and helped the Department of Justice define this new category of extremist violence. Kriner says arresting people who establish or orchestrate these networks won't stop them because what they do is encourage their victims - children - to then become predators.
KRINER: Most of these behaviors and the harms that are being perpetrated are peer-to-peer. So it's happening from youth to youth, and they're bringing in individuals faster than we can disrupt.
YOUSEF: Kriner, Braniff and others say prevention needs to be the focus. That would look like educating teachers, parents and health sector workers to spot warning signs that a child is involved with these networks. And it would shore up therapeutic resources to help kids trying to remove themselves from these networks and deal with the trauma of the online content they've already absorbed.
But the Trump administration has significantly cut federal resources for local violence and terrorism prevention. Braniff says the office he used to head is down from 45 people to six. One of them is its new 22-year-old director, a recent college graduate with no experience in law enforcement or national security. And it appears that agency still hasn't solicited applications from local communities for grants for the current fiscal year, even though only two months remain.
CP3 media representatives did not respond to questions from NPR. Cynthia Miller-Idriss of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University says this means that local and state governments will have to step up. She says there's no doubt that at some point, they will all see instances of these networks' pernicious reach.
CYNTHIA MILLER-IDRISS: I have heard from one after-school practitioner, and they have four families who are dealing with this right now, just in their school district that they're working with.
YOUSEF: Miller-Idriss says without resources and coordination at a federal level, what communities do to counter these effects will be very uneven. She calls this category of violence a whole-of-society issue and one that will require rapid and creative mobilization of resources for communities to address.
Odette Yousef, NPR News.
CHANG: And if you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
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