Copycat killers are not new. The Columbine effect has shown how one attack might become a blueprint for the next. We understood that part. What we’ve struggled to name when it comes to recent shootings is something else. Not violent extremism in the conventional sense. There’s no ideology here, no manifesto with demands. It’s nihilism. Nothing means anything, so the only act that can mean something is one that nobody can look away from. The performance is the point. That idea has been building for years in conversations with colleagues: researchers, clinicians working with kids drawn to gore content, platform safety teams that see what the rest of us don’t. When the mini-series “Adolescence” first aired on Netflix last spring, many parents recognized something in it. They started reaching out to us. Educators, too. They were asking the right questions but had the wrong mental model — thinking lone wolves, thinking mental illness, missing the online communities where alienation gets repackaged as memes, inside jokes and saint worship of past killers until it hardens into a script. We argued in The Times before that despair is the constant in mass shootings. That’s still true. What’s changed is how the internet narrates that despair back to the people who feel it. One detail from our research has stayed with us. On Feb. 10 a shooter in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, killed eight people. Months earlier, OpenAI’s systems flagged the shooter’s ChatGPT conversations for describing violent scenarios. About a dozen employees saw the flags. Some wanted to call the police. Leadership said no. The company banned the account and moved on. We wrote our recent Times Opinion essay because the public deserves to understand how these pathways work. These platforms already have the tools to disrupt them. What they lack, so far, is the will to do so.
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