Society is increasingly threatened by a ‘hybridised’ extremism landscape, in which individuals are radicalised through online ecosystems rather than specific ideologies. An example of this is found in the relatively recent phenomenon of nihilistic violence, which ISD defines as violent acts lacking an ideological motivation and driven by a misanthropic worldview.  

Our research has linked nihilistic subcultures – including the mass murderer worshipping True Crime Community and the pseudo-Satanic No Lives Matter – to several mass attacks in 2024 and 2025. While these attacks bear many of the same overt characteristics of extremist violence, they lack a political or ideological dimension, which can often make them harder to categorise and track.