The online footprint of the 16-year-old who shot two students and then himself at Evergreen High School this week fits into a new wave of online extremism that calls for violence as a way to destroy society, experts said.
Social media accounts for Desmond Holly suggest to experts that he was involved in nihilistic violent extremist networks — which the U.S. Department of Justice defines as people who seek to “destroy civilized society through the corruption and exploitation of vulnerable populations, which often include minors.”
An account on TikTok linked to Desmond showed several hallmarks of that brand of extremism, said Matt Kriner, executive director of the nonprofit Institute for Countering Digital Extremism.
Desmond also held an account and commented on a website called WatchPeopleDie, which features videos of killings, sexual violence and animal cruelty, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
“WatchPeopleDie and other online spaces are the nihilistic network,” said Oren Segal, the ADL’s senior vice president of counter extremism and intelligence. “Those who are spending their time posting images of murders and beheadings and rapes and other horrible things, and also expressing extremist and hateful views, and glorifying past shooters. That makes up this nihilistic network.”
The network originated as an effort to accelerate the collapse of modern society by exacerbating social tensions and dividing society through violence, and has roots in white supremacy and fascism, Kriner said. But the groups have continually evolved, and most nihilistic violent extremists today don’t share a single strong ideology, instead relying on a hodgepodge of different motivations, he said.
“They just hate everyone,” he said. “They don’t really have a goal. The purpose is pain.”
Segal noted that three U.S. mass shooters in the last nine months were active on WatchPeopleDie before their attacks.
“There is a through line between them,” he said. “There is something connecting them, and it is these horrible online spaces. So even though the tragedy is unique every single time, we can point to a common thread. And we need to ask ourselves, ‘How do we stop it?’”
Violent extremist network
Both of the students that Desmond shot at the Jefferson County school remained in critical condition Friday. Desmond’s parents and other relatives have not returned requests for comment since his death.
The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office has confirmed that Desmond was radicalized, but has not provided any additional details on that radicalization or its impact on Wednesday’s attack. Officials have said they were still considering Desmond’s motive.
It’s unlikely that white supremacy was the sole motivation for the shooting at Evergreen High School, Kriner said, adding it is more likely that Desmond was interested in mass shootings, then sought out the extremist spaces online, where he was given the “cultural script” and a guide on how to take action.
It’s a typical progression into violent extremism, Kriner said.
“They build relationships with people in that space, find deeper content that is a little bit more egregious, a little bit more radical — tactics and glorification of past shooters — and it starts to merge into becoming a copycat of those persons as a means of having a strong identity with the new online community they found,” Kriner said.
Desmond’s specific motivation will be difficult to know even with his online activities, Segal said.
“Here is someone who dabbled with neo-Nazi views, antisemitism, glorified past shooters, echoed and posed similarly to them — but what is it about all that that led this person to do this attack? I do not know,” he said. “It is the combination and the blurring of the lines between violent fantasies and hate that is at the heart of this nihilistic network.”
Desmond’s focus on the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, also in Jefferson County, is a central feature of these online extremist ecosystems, Kriner said. Young people across the world obsess with the Columbine attack, reliving it and roleplaying it, he said, aided by extensive public material and media coverage about the killers and their motivations.
“It is the dominant influence within the entirety of that ecosystem online,” he said.
Would-be attackers have even been known to use artificial intelligence chatbots to re-create the personas of the Columbine attackers — with the AI chatbot pulling from the reams of public information on the attack, including the shooters’ writings — allowing the creator to “almost realistically” communicate with them, he added.
Photos on a now-deleted TikTok account linked to Desmond appeared to show him creating and then wearing a T-shirt similar to one worn by one of the Columbine shooters, including a post he made on the day of the attack. In an earlier post showing that T-shirt, he included a photo of the 15-year-old who killed two people and injured six more at a Wisconsin school in December — and mimicked that attacker’s pose in his photo.
That is a final warning sign ahead of an attack, Kriner said.
“The replication of an individual who has previously carried out a shooting like that is almost assuredly a sign that the person had made up their mind to do it,” Kriner said.
On TikTok, Desmond’s profile picture featured a stylized image of the 22-year-old man who killed six people in California in May 2014 — which shows Desmond was heavily online in an “alt-right,” white nationalist space, Kriner said.
In addition to antisemitic and white supremacist references, the account also referred to “141,” the name of a loosely connected network of people online — largely centered on the messaging app Telegram — that grooms young people both sexually and toward acts of violence, Kriner said.
Desmond collected tactical gear and talked online about getting a GoPro camera so he could record his attack, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s review of his accounts.
“You got close to the full setup now man time to make a move,” another user commented on TikTok, according to a screenshot provided by the ADL.
How do you stop this?
Although there are consistent warning signs of radicalization in these online spaces, it can be difficult for authorities to take action on those warning signs.
“Because so much of this falls under the First Amendment, and there is no proof they actively made offline credible actions… they are not obligated to do much with that,” Kriner said, adding that many platforms will take down the content but stop there.
He added that the Trump administration has cut funding for research and monitoring of extremist networks and has pressured social media platforms to take a more hands-off approach.
William Braniff, executive director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, said effective prevention needs to start years before a teenager is exposed to online extremism.
“Prevention is like diet and exercise,” he said. “You don’t want to wait until you have an acute health issue.”
Digital literacy education should start in grade school, he said, with age-appropriate courses designed to help children as young as kindergarten understand how to navigate the online world — just as children are taught not to take candy from strangers, he said.
Teenagers and children can also build up resistance to online extremism with limited and controlled exposure through a method called “pre-bunking.” Braniff said.
“The idea is that if you give individuals a microdose of a harmful, manipulative technique they might come across online, and then you expose that manipulation to the viewer, explain it to them and give them a little bit of an explanation on why it is a manipulation and what the truth is of the situation — it can be a 40-second video — but individuals develop emotional antibodies to being manipulated,” he said. “So once you see that pre-bunking video, when you see similar content online, those emotional antibodies of anger and disgust kick in, and you reject the content.”
People who have gone through such pre-bunking are also significantly more likely to challenge the manipulative content, he added, which can help prevent their friends and other users from falling prey to it.
Another key to prevention is to build a child’s “protective factors,” Braniff said, including having trusted relationships with adults, a strong sense of self and social wellbeing.
Schools and other organizations can create early-response, non-punitive teams staffed with social workers, mental health professionals, coaches and faith leaders to respond to early indications that a child might be considering violence, he added.
He noted that Colorado is a leader in the nation for prevention systems. No system will stop every act of violence, but prevention is still worth investing in, he said.
“There is strong evidence it can work,” he said. “…No one says, ‘A building burned down, so we should stop funding the fire department.’”
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