How Online Algorithms Feed a ‘New and Particularly Nihilistic’ Breed of Violence

He arrived by Uber. He checked into a nearby hotel the night before. He had visited the site on multiple occasions, each trip a reconnaissance mission, not a tourist excursion. By the time Julio César Jasso Ramírez climbed to the summit of Teotihuacán’s Pyramid of the Moon on the morning of April 20 and opened fire on international tourists below, authorities say, he had been planning the attack since at least February.The date was no accident. Investigators determined it was chosen to fall on Adolf Hitler’s 137th birthday and the 27th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre. A Canadian woman was killed and 13 others were wounded — among them six Americans, three Colombians, one Russian, one Brazilian, one Dutch national, and one Canadian, including two children. Jasso Ramírez fatally shot himself as security forces closed in. Prosecutors said preliminary information indicated he had acted alone.So who was he, and what was he part of?What investigators found in his backpack told a story with no cartel fingerprints — only the calling cards of a dark online world. Among the items recovered was an AI-generated photo of Jasso Ramírez posing alongside the Columbine perpetrators and handwritten notes describing him as being guided by “an inspiration from beyond” and following “orders from supernatural entities.”Beneath an outer shirt, he wore a T-shirt bearing the phrase “Disconnect and Self-Destruct” — a phrase long circulated within online communities that glorify the Columbine killers. His backpack held books about the 1999 massacre.The attorney general in the state of Mexico, Attorney General José Luis Cervantes Martínez, said the evidence pointed to a “psychopathic profile characterized by a tendency to copy situations that occurred in other places, at other times and by other people.”But a senior intelligence analyst at the Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium, Paolo Ganino, tells The New York Sun the attack follows a pattern already emerging south of the border.“This event highlights a growing trend of non-cartel violence in Mexico, drawing parallels to a March 2026 attack in Michoacán involving an adolescent motivated by incel ideology,” Mr. Ganino says. He notes that Jasso Ramírez’s actions suggest “neo-Nazi ideologies are entering Mexico’s landscape of violence outside of traditional cartels.”The cartels had nothing to do with this. That is precisely the problem.A threat vector with no flagWhat makes the Teotihuacán attack distinct from nearly every other act of mass violence in Mexico is precisely what it shares with attacks in Austria, Indonesia, Colorado, and Nashville.Researchers at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point have documented at least 21 True Crime Community-linked attacks and foiled plots, involving 23 perpetrators with a median age of 17, spread across the United States, Malaysia, Indonesia, Russia, Austria, Ukraine, and Mexico. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue has separately identified at least nine attacks and 16 disrupted plots since January 2024 associated with the True Crime Community — an online subculture focused on the examination of real-life criminal cases. Its participants range from casual viewers of documentaries and podcasts to deeply engaged individuals who form emotional bonds with criminals and prisoners.In June 2025, a 21-year-old former student killed 10 people — nine students and a teacher — at a high school at Graz, Austria, in the deadliest mass shooting in modern Austrian history. In the first half of September 2025 alone, Institute for Strategic Dialogue analysts provided information on potential TCC-linked threats to authorities in Mexico, Australia, and Romania.The FBI, meanwhile, reported a 300-percent increase in this kind of extremism between late 2024 and late 2025.The Counter Extremism Project’s senior director, Hans-Jakob Schindler, tells the Sun that social media platforms are effectively building the pipeline themselves.“With the introduction of the modern algorithms on social media that focus on maximizing engagement, radicalization has accelerated,” Mr. Schindler explains. “At the same time, unfortunately, content moderation concerning extremist content, including violent content and content promoting violence, has decreased.”The result, Mr. Schindler says, is a new and particularly nihilistic breed of violence — one that needs no manifesto, no political grievance, and no defined enemy.“This new form of extremism promotes violence for the sake of violence and operates on a social reward system which rewards those who conduct violence and rewards those who conduct more or more brutal violence,” he continues. “Within this new nihilistic milieu, there is no discernible overall ideological narrative.”It also explains why Jasso Ramírez’s profile looked the way it did: Nazi salutes in one hand, Columbine books in the other. The same algorithms that push users toward extremist content have no ideological loyalty; they serve whatever keeps someone watching the longest.Mr. Schindler points out that the algorithms driving radicalization are “ideologically eclectic, meaning they will promote whatever extremist content to the user that keeps the user with the content the longest.” The result is what researchers call a “salad bar ideology” — a personalized worldview stitched together from whatever extremist content the algorithm happened to serve up.“These ‘salad bar ideologies’ are, however, not any less dangerous than other violence-promoting extremist ideologies,” Mr. Schindler says.A security apparatus built for the wrong enemyViolence of this kind is without precedent at archaeological sites in Mexico in modern times. President Claudia Sheinbaum acknowledged that Jasso Ramírez was able to enter the site with a weapon because there were no security checkpoints, calling it a situation that had simply never occurred before.The site drew nearly 1.8 million international visitors in 2025 and is currently undergoing its largest renovation in 30 years, a $1.7 million project tied to cultural programming for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, with five matches scheduled for Mexico City beginning in June. Teotihuacán reopened two days after Jasso Ramírez’s attack under reinforced security, though tourist numbers were significantly lower than usual.Mr. Ganino stresses that earlier detection was plausible.“The perpetrator had generated AI photos of himself with mass shooters and posted ‘true crime’ content online. Increased digital surveillance might have identified these radicalization markers before the event,” he says, adding that metal detectors, X-ray scanners, and a higher density of National Guard personnel could have served as deterrents.Yet the detection problem runs deeper than any single site’s security posture. Mr. Schindler underscores that social media platforms already possess the technical means to flag radicalization, but they are not required to use them.“If legally required, these platforms could also analyze user data for signs of radicalization of individuals towards offline violence and issue warnings to the security authorities,” he says. “However, in the current regulatory environment in the United States or in Europe, social media platforms are not required to do this and hence are not doing it.”The Teotihuacán attack is now being examined against this broader pattern — investigators piecing together Jasso Ramírez’s social media footprint and digital history to determine when and how deeply he entered these spaces. What happened atop the Pyramid of the Moon on April 20 was not random. It was planned to the day, timed to a date that carries meaning in the darkest corners of the internet.“Unless we get a handle on social media radicalization with the help of social media platforms,” Mr. Schindler warns, “the processes — single perpetrator scenarios, nihilistic extremism, salad bar ideologies, and online glorification of murderers — will be hard to impossible to reverse.”

How Online Algorithms Feed a ‘New and Particularly Nihilistic’ Breed of Violence

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