Teen's Gore Video Habit Began With AI-Edited TikTok

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. In Jemima’s first year of high school in New Zealand, her social life was flourishing. She had just started going out with a boy in her class, joined the hockey team, was training to be in the New Zealand Cadet Force, and had started competitive swimming. After dates, school, and swim practice, she chose to spend her free time indulging in her favorite online activity: watching gore videos. Jemima’s fascination with gore started when she was 11, when she stumbled across an A.I.-edited video of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting on TikTok. “There were Minions in the place of people,” she told me. “The gun was a Minion, the people were Minions, but you could still see the mosque.” Jemima, who is 15 now and whose name has been changed to protect her identity, lived close to Christchurch and remembered the devastation of the shooting, but watching this edit—a subgenre of A.I. slop known as “Minion gore”—she felt differently about the tragedy. This time, she found it funny. Watching these A.I. edits became a pastime for her friend group; they’d share the videos at school and at sleepovers. One day, after watching a video on TikTok recommending the website called “Watch People Die,” they typed it into their search engine and browsed: murders, suicides, self-immolation, crushing, and disembowelments. The website went beyond people dying; it was an endless archive of human suffering. “It’s some of the most disgusting and violent videos I’ve ever seen,” Jemima said. Her experience isn’t necessarily new. Gore videos have been stitched into the fabric of the internet since the web’s inception, and even shared to the point of virality through shock sites and snuff films. However, what Jemima and far too many children like her experience today goes far beyond morbid curiosity. Children are being fed content incentivized to keep them the most engaged—even if that content consists of some of the most nefarious, brutal, and damaging things a child can see. At the time, watching these videos didn’t elicit nausea or repulsion in Jemima—they came across as amusing. Each video watched alone or with friends compounded the idea that violence and entertainment were synonymous. By the time Jemima was 14 and was invited to a Discord group called “764” that promised extreme gore, watching violent videos was part of her everyday routine. 764 is an online criminal network where vulnerable children are groomed, extorted, and manipulated into engaging in escalating acts of harm. Found on encrypted platforms like Discord and Telegram, members coerce victims to film or photograph themselves creating extreme content, including self-harm, pornography, animal abuse, and sibling assault. Often young victims are coerced into creating “cut signs” or “blood walls,” a form of self-harm where the victim carves out the name of a member of 764 on their body or writes it in blood on a wall or piece of paper. They’re even convinced to harm family pets. While victims are usually underage girls between 10 and 17, many of the predators orchestrating these acts of violence are teenage boys. The content is then circulated around the group. “The more extreme, the better,” former federal prosecutor Carin Duryee told ABC. 764 is just one of many groups in an online ecosystem known as “The Community” or “the Com.” It’s an international network dedicated to on- and offline harm committed through coercion. Both the Com and 764 have roots in a loose movement known as nihilistic violent extremism, which is primarily motivated by a deep hatred of society and a rejection of any one ideology. It’s characterized by a desire to sow chaos and tear down society through profoundly antisocial behavior. The FBI lists 764 as a Tier 1 terrorist threat, with FBI Director Kash Patel going as far as to characterize the group in a post on X as a new form of “modern day terrorism in America.” A central pillar to groups like 764 is the glorification of violence, in particular one’s ability to consume and produce extreme material. “It felt like a brotherhood,” Jemima said. “The people that were perpetrating would ask me to screen-record their calls with victims so they could have a copy of it. I saw people kill their cats, cut themselves.” Although she never extorted anyone herself, Jemima was quickly promoted to the status of editor for the group’s propaganda videos, collecting the acts of violence recorded and shared in the chatrooms to promote membership on wider platforms. In one video, fluorescent time-lapsed flowers are overlayed with different images of nooses. The film feels like a cartoon sequence, distorted images splicing between the visceral and grotesque, from shots of 9/11 to anatomy and innards. It’s uncomfortable yet compelling—and at the end of the minute-long clip the words “JOIN NOW” appear on the screen. What began as an after-school activity had escalated to a full-time role within an extortion community. When I asked Jemima why she felt she was able to consume all this graphic content, she recognized that at this time in her life she was deeply desensitized. “It kind of became normal, and I was like, ‘It’s just gore,’ you know? Half of the shit you see on the internet isn’t true anyways.” Allizandra Herberhold, a nihilistic violent extremism consultant and exit interventionist who works with the nonprofit Parents for Peace, told me extreme content is used as a form of currency in these communities. “There was a kid that was bragging about how he has a Telegram channel with 4,000 different gore videos and how he’s desensitized,” Herberhold said. “It reminds me of when teenage boys say, ‘OK, you punch me,’ ‘Punch me harder,’ and then they say, ‘It didn’t even hurt.’ They’re trying to prove how tough they are. It’s like flexing.” In the Com network, the idea is to be the biggest “edgelord.” An edgelord is a person who posts dark and offensive content for shock value; the more detached you can be, the cooler you are. “I think that there is a lot of competition; who’s the biggest, who’s the baddest, who can handle the most,” Herberhold explained. In these online spaces, the same power dynamics play out that are seen in the parameters of a schoolyard. There’s a hierarchy of belonging—but in this context the metric used to measure acceptance is sadism. “If you can get someone to kill themselves on a live stream, that is the ultimate flex of power. They’re like, ‘Look what I can do, I took someone’s life. How much more power and control could I have? I don’t even have to do anything, that’s how feared I am.’ ” It’s hard to know whether Jemima was aware of this litmus test of edginess, but what’s clear is that repeated exposure to violent material had opened a gateway for her to consume and normalize harm as a form of entertainment. “Almost every single kid that I’ve worked with, one of the initial videos they saw was a suicide, and that made them curious and want to see more suicides,” Herberhold said. With most of the young boys Herberhold has worked with, they’ve stumbled across violent material, proceeded to seek it out, then consumed it in the same way they would anything else online: absently. “This is how one of the kids I worked with described it to me: He’d be sitting in class, pull out his phone, and just start scrolling on Watch People Die, and then was like, ‘Oh my god, what am I doing?’ ” In summer 2023, Elliott was 14 years old and experiencing a rough patch. His friend group was falling apart, he was going through a difficult breakup, and his parents were in the process of separating. “This is what set off a fairly marked incident of self-harm,” Elliott’s mother, Dana, told me. Although Elliott—whose name has been changed for this story—had struggled with self-harm before, it was the beginning of a period in his life where the pursuit of pain was used as a coping mechanism to deal with the instability he was experiencing—even if this pain was directed at something other than himself. “He started talking about politically extreme talking points, speaking about things that were violent, like guns and weapons,” Dana said. “There was a lot of nihilism.” He was being raised in a liberal Jewish household with a vocal and politically progressive mother, and Elliott’s views were out of place. As his language started to change, so did his phone use. “He was picking up his phone and looking at it all the time. I would say, ‘Hey, you know there’s no phones at the dinner table.’ He would lash out.” Elliott checked and scrolled compulsively, bypassing the parental controls, sneaking down to grab his phone from the family charging unit in the kitchen at night. “He was acting like an addict, trying to circumvent things to get more of the substance. There was a lot of irritability, a lot of very aggressive behavior, which is completely unlike him.” According to a 2024 Pew Research study, 38 percent of U.S. teens reported spending too much time on their phone, and nearly half in the study said they were “online almost constantly.” The normalization of being chronically online makes it hard to gauge when phone use becomes addictive, but according to consultant psychologist Darren O’Reilley, addiction should be considered as a restructuring of priorities. “What looks like addiction is usually a shift in how reward is structured in a teenager’s life,” O’Reilley told me. “Digital environments become the easiest and most reliable way to regulate mood, boredom, or stress, so they gradually start to crowd everything else out.” The content Elliott was addicted to was some of the most obscene imaginable, the videos he was consuming for hours a day completely altering his ability to pursue normal dopamine pathways. “He would talk about how the rest of real-world experience just became so flat and meaningless,” Dana explained. “He just wanted to feel something. There’s just no comparison to the dopamine hit you get from short-form videos or enraging content or depressing content. A big part of his recovery was actually just calming him down to baseline again.” In the same way that an overexposure to pornography can flatten the image of sex and lead the viewer to seek more extreme representations, watching considerable amounts of violent content creates the same compulsion—rewiring the brain’s reward system in favor of the more monstrous or taboo. To these kids, the images they were watching became detached from their severity, offering the same dopamine-rich hit as any other short-form video found online. After a series of progressively extreme political rants, and the discovery of a knife in Elliott’s bedroom, Dana learned Elliott was active in 764. He was committed to a hospital in January 2024, where doctors discovered extensive self-harm scars all over his torso, back, thighs, and front. In the hours leading up to Elliott’s hospitalization, his internet history revealed that he’d spent the entire day looking up how to hang himself. In 2024, a survey by Ofcom found that children between ages 8 to 17 described encountering content online that depicted or encouraged violence as being “unavoidable.” The inquiry found that teenage boys were the most likely to share this content onward, expressing that they felt a pressure to watch violent material due to the “high level of engagement this content attracts.” Engagement refers to the popularity of a video—how many clicks, likes, and views. Due to the shock value of violence and gore, these videos often generate high engagement, a digital embodiment of the desire to peek through the cracks between your fingers. The study also revealed that boys between 10 and 14 felt forced to find this material funny, in fear that they wouldn’t “fit in” if they were to have a negative response. The existence of these groups also reflects a general tilt toward nihilism in younger generations. Amid global crises, economic instability, and the threat of climate change, many young people are feeling increasingly despondent. Hopelessness is meme-ified and circulated online, becoming a form of identity that normalizes apathy. Social media has created the conditions for this “doomer mindset” to flourish: Constant exposure to information, algorithm-driven echo chambers, and excessive screen time distort perception and isolate teens, making it harder to discern what’s true. In a time where edgy influencers like Clavicular and HSTikkyTokky are reposted, shared, and platformed for their ability to provoke, morality is bartered for popularity. The existence of 764 is the product of an era of disenchantment where everyone is a troll looking for clicks. Part of it too is the platforms themselves. On our Zoom call, Herberhold scrolls through the TikTok feed she uses as a shell account to study the Com network. It’s a tailored feed of self-harm and emaciated body parts. “I think the algorithm is playing a role, because the only pages that I follow and I’m looking at and interacting with are related to true crime,” she said. “I’m not looking for blood signs, they’re being presented to me.” In conversations with her clients, she said that they report having witnessed similar content on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and more. While 764 is mostly active on encrypted platforms, their content is also being shared on social media—a place where kids can come across it without warning. While directly encountering violent and explicit content can lead kids to escalate what they engage with, there is something particularly sinister about extreme content existing alongside memes, cat videos, cartoons, and football clips. Packaged neatly in 4-by-3 squares of entertainment, the normal and extreme are viewed in equal measure. On a never-ending feed we watch the cute and profane, sleepwalking toward an emotional state beyond shock as entertainment: the banality of passive consumption. In light of the recent Meta lawsuit and the $32 million case in California involving Roblox, alongside multiple warnings by the FBI about the growing threat of 764, there are mounting concerns surrounding the impact of social media on mental health. Schools are on the front line of this issue as an environment where social media is a form of currency, and content is scrolled through, spread, and shared. As of April 2026, new laws in U.S. states like California, Kansas, and Maine and in the U.K. were issued to address phone use in schools. Most of this legislation focuses on creating a digital wellness program—where kids are taught about healthy phone use, digital literacy, and the influence of algorithms and A.I.However, these restrictions come after a period where a tech-first approach to learning has been privileged by school systems. Billions of dollars have been spent on tech for schools, with the percentage of U.S. school districts ordering Chromebooks rising from 84 percent in 2024 to 93 percent in 2025. As Dana told me, Elliott was accessing violent material on his school-issued Chromebook. Despite her efforts to curtail his behavior at home, the very technology bought by schools to help democratize learning had become the medium through which he fell deeper down his rabbit hole. As the U.K., Australia, Denmark, and a growing number of other countries discuss bans on social media for those under 16, there’s a need to examine the way childhood has been distorted as a byproduct of the internet era. The existence of 764—a group designed to engineer desensitization—asks whether we need to view its members as victims of the content they’ve consumed. In August 2021, the founder of 764, 15-year-old Bradley Cadenhead, was arrested on nine counts of possession of child sexual abuse material. In a police interview conducted in 2023, he describes a normal childhood, apart from developing a fascination with violent torture pictures and videos at the age of 10. “He watched them for the shock value,” the file reads, stating he watched videos of this nature constantly from the ages of 10 to 16. Hundreds of images of child sexual abuse material were found on Cadenhead’s devices, but when questioned by an officer, Cadenhead was reported as having little interest in this aspect of the server. The collection of images sitting on his computer symbolize a currency of shock, an archive of inspiration, and a symptom of how repeated exposure to violent material can lead you to normalize and enact the content you consume. In 2023, Cadenhead was sentenced to an adult term of 80 years in prison. Looking at his police file, I can hardly read the signature over his statement; his name is illegible, scrawled and messy, like that of a boy. If you need to talk, or if you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts, call the suicide lifeline at 988 or text the Crisis Text Line at 741-741.