Crime, Compulsion, and Social Media

The Internet and the myriad devices attached to it certainly have their uses, and they are extremely popular. In any public space, practically everybody's eyeballs are virtually glued to the potentially fictitious reality dancing across the screens of their cell phones, and similar trends are ubiquitous when they’re at home as well.

Yet this omnipresent virtual world has a dark side. Many people, especially young people, have been inspired to commit crimes in imitation of what they've seen on social media , ranging from first-person shooter games to the veneration of homicidal imaginary entities.

There are, of course, many possible contributing causal factors in such cases; but violent media have been implicated in a significant ( p < .001) 2.45-fold increase in reported violent behavior with each incremental increase in baseline violent media diet (Ybarra and colleagues, 2022).

Imitative processes with reference to violent social media are also well established (for example, Shah and Kaushik, 2025; Gerbner, Jahlly, and Kilbourne, 2014). There are a great many examples: in the 2024 Tooele homicide in Utah, a child killed his father with weapons and methods from a Call of Duty game, which the child frequently played (KUTV-CBS, 2024).

In 1998, a teenager , with the help of his cousin, murdered his mother with knives and a screwdriver, citing Scream and Scream 2 as their inspiration (for example, Morin, 1999).

An archetypal example of media influence on juvenile violence is probably to be found in the 2014 Slender Man attempted homicide (for example, Davey and Yaccino, 2014), in which two girls stabbed a classmate nineteen times as a kind of sacrifice and affirmation of this imaginary but sinister “creepypasta” character.

Not everyone starts to believe in the malign reality of what they may see on social media, of course, and one frequently encounters some reluctance to consider the people who do; it is perhaps not surprising that media might not focus intensively on the negative aspects of a media industry that generates multibillion-dollar media profits.

But why does anybody commit media-inspired violence in the first place? Human beings tend to imitate what they see, of course, especially if the people they're imitating are powerful or rewarded (for example, Bandura, 1979).

People also tend to conform to popular norms and to obey powerful authorities (see Sharps, 2024, and Sharps and Price-Sharps, 2026, for a review of the interactive cognitive and affective influences of these factors). But why do the Internet and social media appear to have so much power in these regards?

As a somewhat superannuated psychologist, I spent most of my life, to date, in the far-off times of the 20th century; and I would not, in that remote and antiquated era, have invested much in the development of popular computation or cell phones, at least not for future roles in entertainment or amusement.

Squatting for hours to peer into such devices simply seemed, at the time, to be too remote from the realm of what human beings evolved to be . We are social creatures with high sex drives and powerful competitive and acquisitive tendencies in physical reality, as our human and pre-human ancestors were for millions of years, and as most of the animals with which we share this planet continue to be.

The idea that hordes of even young, healthy human beings would choose to spend their waking hours interacting with laptops, essentially flat typewriters spot-welded to very flat TV sets, or staring into cell phones, essentially futuristic and battery-powered 3x5 cards, or that they would do so to the general exclusion of social, physical, and even sexual interactions in the real world, would have seemed unbelievably bizarre to me, and to many other people at the time.

How could we have been so spectacularly wrong? Living creatures are subject to the influence of supernormal stimuli, exaggerated versions of things that would normally elicit a response in …