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Anat Lior, Drexel University On Feb. 10, 2026, an 18-year-old woman, Jesse Van Rootselaar, killed eight people and herself in a mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. OpenAI had previously flagged her ChatGPT conversations as having a disturbing fascination with extreme violence, and suspended her account, but reportedly the company did not notify law ...

By Mischa Gerrard When footage of a knife attack in north Belfast began circulating online, the incident quickly escaped the confines of the street on which it had occurred. Within hours, it was being shared and debated across X, amplified by activists, influencers, and political commentators both within and beyond Northern Ireland. Demonstrations were organised, ...

By Krista Fisher, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Emily Lewis, Ruben Benakovic, and Zac Seidler Interest in the manosphere has recently surged yet again, with the recent Louis Theroux documentary catapulting the term “manosphere” back to the forefront of our cultural psyche. The term has become a catchall for the most inflammatory content and communities in young men’s ...

By Saddiq Basha The re-enactment of real-world mass casualty attacks on Roblox has become a recognised phenomenon within the True Crime Community (TCC)—a multi-layered online fandom that valorises perpetrators of mass violence regardless of ideology, ranging from those who consume and discuss such content to those who, at the extreme, seek to emulate them. Such ...

By Inger Storm Sandboe and Antara Chakraborthy Introduction Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary on the manosphere has renewed mainstream attention to online subcultures often dismissed as fringe. This coincides with a broader discursive shift: the normalisation of a distinct ‘biological’ vocabulary in manosphere discourse. This rhetoric usually relies on a weak scientific basis, selectively interpreted or ...

By Saif Tahir Nihilism, defined by the ISD as “an ideology that centres around rejection of all moral and social values with the belief that life is meaningless,” rose to recent prominence after the detection and arrest of members of the decentralised COM and 764 networks who were found coercing minors aged 8-17 into violence. ...

Amarnath Amarasingam, Queen’s University, Ontario Two teenaged gunmen recently opened fire at the Islamic Center of San Diego, killing a security guard and two staff members before being found with fatal self-inflicted wounds in a nearby vehicle. Like so many recent extremist mass shootings, they livestreamed the attack and, uniquely, even livestreamed their suicides. Police ...

By Kamil Yilmaz In April 2026, Türkiye was shaken by two unprecedented school shootings in the country’s southeastern region. The first attack was carried out on April 14 by Ömer Ket, a 19-year-old former student at Ahmet Koyuncu Vocational and Technical Anatolian High School in Siverek, Şanlıurfa, who injured 16 people before dying by suicide. ...

The Meta Oversight Board’s Advisory Opinion on Global Community Notes Rollout By Yohannes Eneyew Ayalew & Maria O’Sullivan Meta is a powerful global company, operating social media platforms that shape public opinion and influence elections. However, the company’s attempts to counter false or misleading information on its platforms has been the subject of widespread criticism ...

By Bo Min Keum First: why history? Incel subculture did not start misogynistic or violent. This has been largely acknowledged. What’s less understood is how exactly celibacy came to be about misogyny and violence over time. Understanding this history matters today because it shows that radicalization is not a unilateral outcome of online platforms or ...