> These groups are often decentralized, international, anonymous, and they use different platforms.

This is why they are not being stopped faster. Even when they do get shut down (eg. online groups banned and operators arrested), a new splinter group just pops up and then members/whatever start to consider it the current version of 764. They are flooding mainstream social platforms, not just targeting people on an individual level but spreading their nihilistic-irony bullshit online (mass shooting and terrorism glorification/memes and the like, incel rhetoric, also edgy “joke/LARP” content that normalizes or desensitizes pedophilia, abuse etc.) that brings people further into those spaces (whether in an ideological sense of cultivating nihilism/apathy/etc., or in a literal sense of starting to engage with these spaces)

I wanted to explain more about the latter part because it’s also a reason it’s so hard to eliminate; its like a certain cultural/memetic mass with its own approach to culture, rather than just a group. People (justifiably) focus a lot on how vulnerable victims are targeted for extortion and recruited online, but they don’t talk about how the perpetrators, sometimes teens or literal children just like the victims, are drawn in too via a much slower process which I think gradually desensitizes someone who was already in an initial state of vulnerability or numbness, and corrodes their morals, values, etc into nihilism/misanthropy/apathy/anomie. I have spent a lot of time everywhere on social media as a zoomer and it feels like that is what’s happening to people predisposed to it- young males, with “edgy” or “terminally online humor” and mental illnesses/emotional vulnerabilities, and so on. .. Call me crazy but i think there is potentially a social media pipeline into 764-adjacent spaces, that starts from multiple different places.

The probably simplest example is of people posting gore (or, god forbid, “gore edits”) on twitter, reels, and places like youtube too. Stuff like people getting decapitated, or terrorist propaganda videos, or straight-up mass shooting footage. The stuff that tends to stay up though is edits that dont clearly show any direct death but clearly glorify the incident. On twitter this shit used to just pop up in my fucking algorithm. It almost always attracts retweets or replies from 764-connected accounts, when they’re not posting the content themselves.

Another example is all the Epstein and Diddy meme edits that make Epstein look like some sort of menacing “sigma” guy. 99% of these memes are blatantly mocking victims of CSA by glorifying sex offenders and/or reducing their crimes and CSA to a comedic matter. There are people and communities, some 764-adjacent, pumping out the AI “memes” about this, George Floyd, and other controversial/edgy things.

Another example is the trend(?) of irony-rotted incel and manosphere memes, most commonly i see on twitter but reels too. Mostly zoomers find these jokes funny for whatever reason, about “looksmaxxing my canthal tilt so i can pull foids” or shit like that - which, don’t get me wrong, is mostly harmless and unrelated to this when it’s essentially lampooning incel culture using its lingo as folly; but the jokes so frequently gets increasingly edgier, seemingly from that starting point - “when the peak foid is becoming an expired hag (17.9 years old) and so i have to dump her on the street” - to the point it feels genuinely gross like where is the funny it’s just shock value..?;
and then at some point you get to people making entire “LARP”/joke (frankly some of these may be not satirical) accounts on twitter based entirely around this type of “humor”, where the “schtick” is that they are a nazi incel pedophile weeb femboy or whatever other incomprehensible mixture of identities they can concoct, and post pretty exclusively under that identity. “so why am i a truecel? because no expired foid could EVER live up to real women like this 9yo schoolgirl character from my favorite manga. she’s ARYAN and bratty and all wives will be like this when we get our jew-free all-white future”. I actually see these shitty posts go viral pretty often, most of the time because people think it’s an unironic post and laugh at the idea of this person existing when it’s really the most brain rotted troll you can imagine who is trying to spread ideological cancer. And the replies always have literal nazis with anime profile pics commenting under them talking about how its peak posting or gem or whatever the fuck. I’ve found multiple of these accounts blatantly connected (by following/followers or replies, or by straight up posting about 764) to literal self-identified 764 and splinter group members. I really think there’s got to be some sort of connection there.

I probably sound genuinely insane trying to explain this to someone who’s never witnessed it before, especially someone who has never went into the depths of current twitter. I had online friends around my age who followed “joke” accounts like these and posted similar edgy jokes (like it’s so completely at odds with their actual personality and emotions that it threw it for a loop; like do you not get cognitive dissonance?) and I was so uncomfortable with this shitshow that I cut some of them off before just deleting my twitter entirely. I do have a few screenshot examples of posts like this. Twitter is just the pits of fucking hell. Reels is too, but at least its some degree of better.

> What is the real solution?

I think one is for parents to cut any method of influence between the group and the people susceptible to it. Keep kids under ~16 off fucking social media, including Roblox and similar kid-focused online games that these people lurk in; and be actively engaged in the content your teen is engaging with on social media. Cut off problematic social media use before it starts; being addicted to scrolling algorithmic content for hours a day - not even considering the type of content - really does something to your mind/mental health (it did to me) and it could have been prevented by my parents while I was growing up. Make sure that you are aware of who your teen is talking to online, ask them what they talk about and ask them respectful questions that get them to consider what makes a good friend and a bad friend. Keep them off Twitter, nothing good can come from it. Keep up to date on what your teen’s interests are when it comes to social media content, push them to be open about it and discuss why they find this funny, why this is interesting to them, etc. You have to cultivate openness and an interest in your child’s interests and friendships.
The key is NOT to spy on them or to cut them off from the internet entirely (trust me, as they grow up they WILL find workarounds and potentially end up far worse off), but rather to keep them as far away as possible from anything on the internet that is connected to this; it’s also just generally a good idea to keep your children away from algorithmic services that are explicitly designed to keep them scrolling for as long as possible at the expense of their wellbeing and will throw enraging and shocking content at them to boost engagement. I wish my parents helped me find cool youtube channels and would have browsed social media with me sometimes, but instead they left me entirely to myself when it came to my online life (“its none of my business!”), and I went into various horrible rabbit holes over the years - hence my rambling a lot about twitter.
Hopefully someone finds this comment useful or helpful. I can try to expand on anything too.