Lady Gaga shattered the record for the highest attended concert by a female artist in history with a free show at Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro on Saturday, with a staggering crowd of more than 2 million catching her first live performance in Brazil since 2012. What the pop star and her team didn’t know until the following morning was that the gathering had allegedly been the target of a plot by violent extremists operating an online hate group: Police revealed on Sunday that they had raided the homes of 15 suspects across several states in the country, seizing electronic devices and arresting three individuals accused of involvement in the conspiracy.
The highly secured concert unfolded with no reported injuries, and the details of the potential attack — which police said they had not warned the public about in order to avoid “panic” and misinformation — remain murky. Authorities said they had arrested a man believed to be the extremist group’s leader in the state of Rio Grande do Sul on charges of illegal weapons possession, and a teenager in Rio de Janeiro allegedly in possession of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). A third person, alleged to have plotted the killing of a “child or baby” in a “satanist ritual” at the concert, was arrested on a terrorism charge. Despite the police’s mention of plans to attack the Copacabana crowd with “improvised explosives and Molotov cocktails,” possibly motivated by anti-LGBTQ hatred, they did not report recovering any such explosives in their raids.
It’s not clear whether the people swept up in the dragnet had the means or ability to carry out the kind of massacre they had allegedly envisioned. But the extremist network described by Brazil’s Ministry of Justice and Public Security following the arrests bears a strong resemblance to other digital organizations that have been investigated by law enforcement around the globe in recent months. This particular “criminal” community operated across “digital platforms,” the federal ministry said in a statement, and “promoted the radicalization of adolescents, the dissemination of hate crimes, self-harm and violent content.” The Civil Police of Rio de Janeiro state, which worked on the investigation with Brazil’s Cyber Operations Laboratory and a child victims police unit, claimed that individuals posing as fans of Lady Gaga were recruiting youths for a coordinated attack, and that the plan “was treated as a ‘collective challenge’ with the aim of gaining notoriety on social media.” (Because Gaga fans are affectionately known as “Little Monsters,” police called their probe “Operation Fake Monster,” alluding to the phony identities that the suspects had allegedly used to lure youths into a would-be terror plot.)
Although neither this group nor individuals supposedly participating in it were named in these official statements, the allegations extend a disturbing trend in cybercrime that authorities and experts say can lead to real-world violence and abuse. Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a sociologist and the founding director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University, has briefed legislators on the dangers of such online communities, which the FBI now calls “nihilistic violent extremist” networks, or NVEs. She tells Rolling Stone that the Brazil-based cell was following “very similar tactics” to established NVE groups including Order of Nine Angles (O9A), CVLT, and 764, sprawling entities that keep “changing and morphing,” sprouting various factions and offshoots. The scope of the problem is immense, she notes: the FBI has opened more than 250 investigations into 764-connected activities alone, with all 55 of its field offices handling at least one such case.
The associated networks pose a difficulty to law enforcement because they lack the sort of hierarchy and ideological consistency that allow for routing surveillance. “It’s not a kind of coherent extremist group structure with a membership list and initiation rights or something,” Miller-Idriss explains. “It’s a cluster of groups that are related to each other, and their tactics are exploited, in some cases, by extremist groups that are neo-Nazi, or have other aims, like the accelerationist collapse of social mores and society. But others are just exploiting kids as part of kind of gore fandom, or mass shooter fandom.”
The collectives are able to pull adolescents into their orbit by first establishing contact on public platforms, according to an April report from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canada’s national police force. “These groups operate virtually in very accessible online spaces” including platforms “such as Discord, Telegram, Roblox, Minecraft, Twitch, and Steam,” the agency noted. They may communicate through coded jargon to skirt moderation on more mainstream apps. Once ensnared, victims are exposed to increasingly graphic, violent, hateful and taboo content. Sooner or later, “the predator influences the child or youth into conducting acts that increasingly shame, incriminate, or isolate them, making them vulnerable to further exploitation,” the RCMP warned.
“It’s something that we’re just starting to grapple with among a generation that feels increasingly apathetic and immune to the horrors of violence because they’ve been exposed to so much of it,” Miller-Idriss says. She adds that high school and college students she’s interviewed report feeling “numb” to graphically violent, sexual, or otherwise shocking content that may show up in their social feeds, and that such “extreme desensitization” leads them to accept this material as “part of the way that you live your life online.” That, in turn, she believes, makes it “a little bit easier for for bad actors to exploit kids.” There are gender elements at play, too, she observes, describing a subculture of boys “sharing ever more salacious content” as an edgy form of “one-upmanship,” until they lose sight of how deep they are in a gruesome vortex. On the other side, certain bad actors prey on girls who post on self-help forms or in online communities for the disabled: “They convince these girls that they’re a boyfriend, that they love them, and they get them to do stuff that way,” Miller-Idriss says. “It’s a lot of manipulation.”
The U.K.’s National Crime Agency issued its own guidance on NVEs, also known as “Com Networks” — members of a given group might refer to it as “The Com” — in a March report. These forums, the NCA explained, “see offenders collaborate or compete to cause harm across a broad spectrum of criminality,” and while there are adult participants, “of particular concern is that offenders are predominantly teenage boys that often share sadistic and misogynistic material, and have been seen to target those their own age or younger.” NCA Director General Graeme Biggar characterized the phenomenon as “violent online gangs where they are collaborating at scale to inflict, or incite others to commit, serious harm.”
Law enforcement agencies have additionally emphasized the competitive and self-mythologizing aspect of the forums. “As victims provide photos and videos to their predators, they are shared within ‘The Com’ network, further shaming the victim and creating content for the group,” the RCMP said. “Most importantly, predators do so with the objective of gaining notoriety within ‘The Com’ network as these instances of victimization are seen as a success and a ‘claim to fame.’”
Rolling Stone previously reported on a January indictment of four men who allegedly victimized more than a dozen minors through the online group CVLT. Federal authorities in the U.S. called the network a “neo-Nazi child exploitation enterprise” that “groomed and then coerced minors to produce child sexual abuse material and images of self-harm,” sometimes with the ultimate goal of convincing youths to kill themselves on livestream. That indictment referred to two unnamed minors as co-conspirators, including one also identified as a victim. Just last week, the Department of Justice announced that two leaders of the “764 Inferno” subgroup of that network had been charged with directing and disseminating CSAM, and face a maximum penalty of life in prison if convicted. Prosecutors called 764 a collective of “nihilistic violent extremists who engage in criminal conduct in the United States and abroad, seeking to destroy civilized society through the corruption and exploitation of vulnerable populations, which often include minors.”
In a March alert, the FBI offered a list of warning signs a young person might exhibit when victimized by an NVE, including becoming suddenly withdrawn, harming animals, and idealizing mass casualty events. Miller-Idriss agrees that a “primary prevention approach” is essential to reducing harm. “Adults often are not aware of” this new threat, she says, stressing the need for “media literacy and warning kids and adults about scamming tactics.” She points out that the FBI is advising parents to “watch out if your kids are wearing long sleeves and warm summer months, because there’s a lot of cutting on camera that happens In these groups.”
Regarding the activities of those associated with 764, CVLT, and similar gangs, the bureau said that some “are motivated by a desire to cause fear and chaos through their criminal conduct,” but that “motivations are highly individualized, and some threat actors may be engaging in criminal activity solely for sexual gratification, social status or a sense of belonging, or for a mix of other reasons that may not be ideologically motivated.” The word “belonging” appeared multiple times in the statements by Brazilian law enforcement about the group that allegedly schemed to bomb the Lady Gaga concert in Rio. The county’s justice ministry addressed the dangers of a “digital identity used to co-opt teenagers, disguised as innocence and belonging, but operating in closed networks with violent and self-destructive content.”
For all their anarchic activity, “the thing that caught that unites the groups, really, is nihilism,” says Miller-Idriss. “The question is, what is that nihilism being used toward?” In some cases, neo-Nazis are “exploiting that nihilism to try to desensitize kids and groom them for ever-escalating layers of violence,” she says, but “some of it is just the pursuit of violence in its own valorized way, as a strategy for collapsing society or or or promoting nihilism itself.” Even though the phenomenon is not an outgrowth of strictly partisan viewpoints, Miller-Idriss concludes, “it is horrifically effective.”
It’s still too early, perhaps, to completely account for the uptick this horrific online behavior, which is diffuse yet pervasive enough to present serious challenges to parents and police hoping to protect children from such exploitation. One might argue that massive moderation failures, the toxic political climate, and social isolation have all been contributing factors. Whatever the root causes, it seems that while the internet continues to evolve, it rarely gets any safer.
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