The United States Department of Justice has classified 764, a decentralized, global network of online communities that glorify violence and engage in a range of criminal activities, including sextortion and the distribution of child exploitation materials, as a terror network. The FBI has categorized 764 as a Tier One terrorist threat, the highest priority afforded to an extremist group, ideology, or tendency. The goal of this group has been the dissolution of the United States of America, but as its reach has spread across borders, the group is more than a national security threat, it is an international security threat that targets the world’s softest targets.
The network is most present on Discord and Telegram and targets children and other vulnerable people who feel marginalized, hopeless and isolated. Victims are often forced to commit and record acts of sexual abuse, self-harm, animal cruelty, and extreme violence. The group posts photographs and videos of people engaging in sexually explicit acts, self-harm, and brutal assaults, and encourage acts of mass violence on social media platforms.
Two American citizens involved with 764 have been arrested and charged with operating an international child exploitation enterprise. Court hearings in Washington, D.C. are pending for both defendants. According to the affidavit in the District of Columbia, “764 is a network 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. The 764 network’s accelerationist goals include social unrest and the downfall of the current world order, including the United States Government.”
The FBI has more than 250 investigations ongoing into this group with every single one of its 55 field offices across the country handling 764-related cases. 764 was founded by an American teenager from Texas and has spread across the pond and our northern border. In January, a 19-year-old British teenager plead guilty to encouraging children to commit suicide, possession of a terrorism manual, and possession of indecent images of a child. The court heard that the 19-year-old from Horsham was part of an extreme right-wing Satanist group called 764, which British anti-terror police also warn poses “an immense threat.” At least four British teenagers have been arrested in connection with the activities of the group, which has blackmailed children – mainly girls – into carrying out sexual acts, harming themselves and attempting suicide.
A Narrative Threat Requires a Narrative Strategy
To fully understand threats like 764 is to understand it as a narrative threat. To defeat it and others like it requires a narrative strategy—not to counter the threat, but to envelope and co-opt it.
A narrative, as we use it at Narrative Strategies, is a meta-thematic culture-defining myth into which individuals are born and socialized. Socialization involves the internalization of cultural norms and expectations including those of identity and meaning. When internalized, the cultural narrative becomes an internal cognitive scheme or internal meaning map that sorts incoming information. A narrative attack is an attack on a cultural narrative. It’s an attack on the fabric that defines a culture and its citizens. That’s the mythical thematic big story (the narrative).
A story is different from a cultural narrative. A story is a specific, smaller version of the theme, and it reflects the narrative in both form and content. An example of a cultural narrative in the West is “The Hero’s Journey.” The story told in the Hunger Games and the movies, novels, biographies and autobiographies that depict a person’s journey through a series of challenges that transform them into a “hero” whose new knowledge, skills, and powers benefit the world exemplify the underlying cultural narrative.
Keep in mind that cultural narratives are not usually very conscious. We were all socialized within cultural narrative environments at very young ages, and we did not have conscious awareness of being socialized. We are, however, conscious of the multiplicity of stories we tell and engage with.
A narrative attack is one that targets a cultural narrative through weaponized storytelling. To target a culture’s narrative is, at bottom, to attack a culture’s social meaning and cultural identity at multiple layers from personal to tribal to national and all the layers in-between.
Vulnerability
A narrative strategy is one that introduces and socializes a more compelling and persuasive societal meaning, thereby co-opting it. You can’t win by just reacting to your adversary because a “counternarrative” is a response to a narrative that already pervades the narrative space.
Increasingly, youth worldwide have been under siege from several unconventional cyber-borne threats to their psychological well-being and sociological security – imperiling the resilience of civil society and the future of nations. With the complexity and insidious nature of recent narrative threats such as the 764 network we have reached a tipping point.
At the most vulnerable as well as most promising time of their lives, youth already face a litany of challenges to self-actualization. The CDCs Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data Summary & Trends Report noted, for example, that while there were decreases in substance abuse among teenagers, there were increases in experiences of violence, signs of poor mental health, suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
Social media and technology are both a blessing and a curse. Social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok have become primary sources of information for young people, transforming how they consume and perceive the world. And while gaming platforms have created new forms of entertainment and community membership, they have been used to contact, target and exploit vulnerable individuals at an alarming rate. “Young people may be particularly vulnerable to social media’s charms—as well as its harms,” Kirsten Weir of the American Psychological Association observed. “During adolescent development, brain regions associated with the desire for attention, feedback, and reinforcement from peers become more sensitive. Meanwhile, the brain regions involved in self-control have not fully matured. That can be a recipe for disaster.”
The age when kids begin to believe in unproven conspiracy theories is around 14, according to a September 2021 British Journal of Developmental Psychology study. In a 2016 Stanford University study involving nearly 8,000 U.S. students, more than 80 percent of middle schoolers believed that an advertisement labeled as sponsored content was actually a news story. And less than 20 percent of high schoolers seriously questioned spurious claims in social media. For children and adolescents with intellectual or developmental challenges the threat can be even greater.
The threats that arise from exposure to false information alone are daunting. And disinformation, racism and bigotry in the form of algorithmic and filter bias, online porn, hate speech, deepfakes, cyber-bullying, and content that promotes dangerous behaviors such as eating disorders, self-harm, and extreme violence accentuate the threat posed by online platforms. For the most part, kids (and parents) are simply not prepared to deal with these influences, and artificial intelligence is only getting started.
Much of this is enabled by inadvertent or careless overuse of the internet and in ungoverned social media spaces that resemble the Wild West. An outstanding example is how criminal networks have been taking photos and videos of children shared by parents online and using AI to deepfake them to create illegal child sexual images to support sextortion, identity theft, and other illegal activities. This has become so much a threat that it prompted Deutsche Telekom, the parent company for T-Mobile, to initiate a ShareWithCare public awareness program aimed at parents “sharenting” photos, videos, and information on their children on social media.
764 And More
764’s ideological framework is rooted in nihilism, misanthropy, and anarchy, with a worldview that rejects moral norms and sees no value in human life, “By blending violent extremism, nihilism and the exploitation of minors, 764 represents a dangerous, multifaceted threat that challenges conventional definitions of extremism and existing counterterrorism frameworks,” according to the Anti-Defamation League noted.
To gain acceptance in the network, potential recruits are prompted to commit violent criminal acts, including murder, and egregious acts of self-harm or animal cruelty. “It becomes a competition within the group to see who can get the kids to do the most horrible things,” researcher Becca Spinks explains in Episode 18 of Going Rogue with Lara Logan.
These online cultist groups are much more than extortion networks (of which there are many) looking for money. “It’s about notoriety,” according to Spinks, “a lot of times they’re trying to make the kids abusers themselves. It’s part of what they call an accelerationist ideology, where they’re basically striving for a societal collapse.” Rather than on the dark web, they exploit open social media platforms to recruit and engage vulnerable and distressed youth in, for example, eating disorder chat groups, to accelerate a fast-growing infrastructure of violence and gore.
The threat landscape is not limited to 764, as new non-state actors emerge and pose significant and insidious threats to children and adolescents across the globe. For example, a teenager arrested in Canada was part of a deliberate Russian campaign to recruit untrained spies below or barely legal age, financing it through cryptocurrency.
Responses to the Threat So Far
Chief among emerging responses, other than public awareness programs such as the one by Deutsche Telekom or webcasts like Going Rogue, is the idea of building resilience of “soft targets” like youths through media literacy.
A Disinformation Social Media Alliance report in February stressed that, in an increasingly complex and interconnected digital world, media literacy is a necessity. Equipping young people with the skills to critically evaluate information, identify misinformation, and understand the potential impact of their online actions is essential for their safety, “Recognizing the growing need for digital literacy, 90% of young people… advocate for enhanced education in schools focusing on AI, fake news detection, and responsible online engagement,” the report says.
The Kids Online Safety Act, a bipartisan bill introduced in April 2024, established a duty of care for social media companies to protect minors from mental health harms, sex trafficking, narcotics, and other dangers. It would have required social media companies to go through independent external audits. Unfortunately, the Act, like the Digital Citizenship and Media Literacy Act of 2019, remains bogged down in congressional quagmire.
What is Really Needed: A Narrative Strategy
These are all serious and welcome initiatives, but it’s going to take a lot more than schools and engaged parenting to avert this threat to the core identity of American society. Hardening the soft target of our youth will go far to meet the threat, but it will ultimately take a narrative strategy as the critical foundation of a long-term, whole-of-society approach—one that out-frames negative threats within more positive, more compelling, and more empowering societal ethos.
This is not just a matter of national security against enemies both foreign and domestic. From a national security standpoint, it is adopting a comprehensive understanding of civil defense that goes well beyond the days of the Cold War. Now it is much more about protecting moral rather than physical infrastructure.
Weaponized narrative is the greatest of threats to our civil society and citizenry. Building resiliency among our youth is the primary defense component of a full narrative strategy. Our adversaries and their unwitting accomplices are more than re-engineering the way we receive and perceive information. They are eroding the cultural and socio-psychological underpinnings of American civil society – quickly and with devastating impact.
How do we arm civilians faced with such a psychological threat? Some have suggested teaching critical reasoning en masse. Others have suggested methods of tracing sources of (dis) information so audiences can understand the intent of the “messages.” But those suggestions make a critical mistake about the nature of the threat. They assume the threat is disinformation and therefore revert to information security tactics even in the psychological realm. Disinformation itself is not the threat.
In the psychological realm the goal of disinformation is not simply to get the audience to believe something that is false. The goal is to affect the mental mapping of the audience by encouraging misidentification. Once that is achieved, the terrorists’ work is done. The target population will then categorize incoming information according to the new narrative frame and will act accordingly in such a way that undermines the values that have held together their very identities. What we need to combat this terrorist onslaught is to out-frame the weaponized narrative frame.
So far, we have failed to educate our homeland population about how cultural narratives provide a cohesive foundation upon which our identities as citizens are forged. We have failed to educate our citizens about how our stories are linked to our national narrative and what an attack on our narrative feels like, what it sounds like, and how it makes us feel. How can the weakest and most vulnerable among us defend themselves when even our adult population can’t recognize the threat?
Rather than simply a policy or a legislative approach that dumps the problem off at the doorstep of our schools and other institutions, the narrative threat to America’s youth requires a societal response—and leadership to prompt and steer that.
This will involve generational work, involving the internalization of cultural norms and expectations including those of identity and meaning, that address the cultural, civic and political vulnerabilities in contemporary America. When internalized, the cultural narrative becomes an internal cognitive scheme or internal meaning map that helps end users sort incoming information.
Re-contextualization and re-socialization of time-honored American principles and values involves the internalization of cultural norms and expectations, particularly those of identity and meaning. When internalized, the resulting cultural narrative becomes an internal cognitive scheme or internal meaning map that sorts incoming information and provides resilience in a rapidly changing world.
Among some re-emerging narratives is the idea of a universal narrative of service to others. The democratization of our understanding of service found short-lived growth during the pandemic; we need to re-stimulate it. A sense of citizenship, starting with civic action, that is as much earned as given can also help enfranchise and self-actualize much of our disconnected youth and marginalized groups, improving social cohesion and resilience, socioeconomic outcomes, and even crime.
In its final report in 2023, the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service noted: “From the earliest days of the Republic, service has been a central part of what it means to be an American—and it remains so today. Civic engagement and service are critical to the health and well-being of the Nation; by bringing people together to tackle common problems, service makes communities stronger and strengthens American democracy.”
Any good strategy focuses on identifying and playing strengths more than just reacting to threats and covering vulnerabilities. Americans, young and old, have more power to change things than they may realize. They need not just sit and wait for the government to come up with something, nor go very far to do something, for there are myriad ways to become citizens as responsible to neighbors as to nation.
This is the empowering narrative framing that our cultural and thought leaders should promote and project.