Last Monday, a 14-year-old student shot the director and a teacher at the Joseph-Lakanal school, in Aubagne, in the southeast of France. The boy has denied that he wanted to kill them and claims that he acted out of revenge for the alleged harassment of teachers and classmates, a version that has not yet been corroborated by investigators.
The shooting has generated enormous commotion in France. On Thursday the police arrested a companion of the young man. Both were linked to the True Crime Community (TCC) community, as explained by the Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor's Office.
"A first examination of his social media accounts during the period of police detention pointed to his probable connection with the True Crime Community," says the Prosecutor's Office in charge of the case. One of those accounts "was dedicated exclusively to republishing content related to this community—characterized by extreme violence—and, more specifically, school shootings," he details.
What is the 'true crime' community?
The True Crime Community (TCC) is a fandom and digital subculture that revolves around consumption, debate, celebration, and—in its most extreme manifestations—the emulation of real crimes and their perpetrators. In particular, they are attracted to serial killers and perpetrators of mass murders with high media coverage. The term encompasses both consumers of mainstream true crime content and a more marginal and extremist sector.
CBT has emerged from the fusion between popular media and extremist communities. People who consume videos, podcasts, articles, online forums and content on social networks related to this type of crimes have joined. It moves mainly in open networks such as TikTok, YouTube or Reddit, but then migrates to more closed spaces such as Discord or Telegram.
The True Crime Community functions "as a complex fandom culture, in which the perpetrators of attacks with multiple victims are objects of investigation, aestheticization and imitation, to end up being integrated into a shared mythical imaginary." This is explained by Peter Smith, Cat Cadenhead and Clara Broekaert in an article published in the Counterterrorism Center at West Point, based on documented cases of violent attacks that occurred between 2024 and 2025.
The case of Sweden this year
The True Crime Community resurfaces in the media due to the case in France, but in August of this same year we experienced another episode related to this community in Sweden. Teenager Liam Nebel attacked his former classmates and former teachers at Fagersta High School with a sword. It left one dead and three minors injured.
The boy acted motivated by the desire for retaliation for the school bullying he had suffered. It was later revealed that he had created social media content linked to CBT, including videos depicting the perpetrators of previous mass attacks.
His account contained videos of so-called rampage dances created using artificial intelligence to represent mass murderers. Nebel used the same symbol used by members of the community, something like the TCC logo, according to the Swedish newspaper Expressen.
Indeed, what has been seen is that TCC members create and share AI-generated videos on social networks in which terrorists and murderers appear dancing in the places where they carried out their attacks. In each rampage dance, victims are usually represented by the number of dead people, explains an article published by the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET).
To recreate places and events linked to real massacres or murders, those from the TCC also use video games such as Minecraft and Roblox. There are groups that call themselves "video game studios" that are in charge of developing and disseminating maps within these games that simulate large massacres, such as the one at Columbine High School (1999), the Uvalde school shooting (2022) or the Parkland high school shooting (2018).
Idealization and imitation of nihilistic violence
The authors of the Counterterrorism Center article situate CBT within the broader landscape of nihilistic violence and meme-based participatory extremist networks. These networks are supported by a system of symbolism, references and aesthetic allusions that make up a language comprehensible only to the members of the community.
"CBT constitutes a form of digitally mediated participation in which violence becomes a symbolic language, rather than an ideological act," the authors say. Its members provide mutual support in searching for and consuming materials related to mass murderers.
Such consumption can lead to radicalization. It happens that, as the American Psychological Association warns, repeated exposure reduces the emotional response and ends up normalizing violence.
Its hierarchical structure shows how individuals can move from a conventional interest in true crime to more closed and transgressive subcultures, which glorify the perpetrators and aestheticize the damage. For this reason, Smith, Cadenhead and Broekaert consider that CBT "constitutes a self-sustaining threat vector."
The True Crime Community has this hierarchical structure and usually responds to a pattern. Everything usually starts with casual consumption, but can then escalate to more active participation, such as reconstructing cases or following the perpetrators.
The phenomenon has also been studied by the United States Secret Service. They have detected that in advanced stages, CBT followers identify emotionally with the aggressors they admire. Thus, they have seen that many aggressors had studied previous cases before acting. It is the so-called copycat effect: intensive coverage of violence generates imitators.
