Individuals who watch violent videos where people are being beheaded and mutilated might be a risk group prone to turning into murderers who can carry out unprecedented massacres, according to criminal justice experts. Described as the "0 to 100 killers", such people often do not have a criminal record and aren't the usual suspects.

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As per the experts, they are loners who spend a huge portion of their time on the internet, watching torture and mutilation videos. Till now, there wasn't an established link between watching such videos and carrying them out in real life. A study also dismissed any concerns about violent video games and emulating the actions outside them.

However, some observers now think there is a connection.

Violence on the internet creating new 'threat cohort'

A report in The Guardian quotes Jonathan Hall, the government's independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, as saying that there is now a "new threat cohort" that is rising because of the internet.

This is a group that is radicalised online and has reached "a dark world on the internet". 

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Hall says they are "mostly boys" who are "isolated loners", with "quite a high proportion" of them having "neurodivergence".

"We have to be stark about this - this behaviour couldn't have existed without the internet because it is the source of the idea that certain types of violence are the solution," Hall said as quoted in the report.

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While a certain section of the youth also indulges in violent video games, they supposedly don't have the same impact on their minds as real violence shown on social media. 

David Wilson, emeritus professor of criminology at Birmingham City University, told Daily Mail, that the two things are quite different from one another.

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He says that violence on social media is more extreme and is aggravated by the fact that it is often consumed in isolation.

Algorithms tend to worsen the situation as similar gory content is then continuously pushed to a user. 

Prof Wilson says that the so-called "0 to 100 killers" do not take years to display extreme actions as is the belief about criminal behaviour. It goes from nothing to another extreme in a very short span of time.

The case of 19-year-old Nicholas Prosper who slaughtered his family

A case in point is Nicholas Prosper, who massacred three members of his family in September last year. He murdered his mother Juliana Falcon, his 16-year-old brother Kyle Prosper and his 13-year-old sister Giselle Prosper at their home in Luton, a town in England.

The discovery of a loaded shotgun in bushes nearby offered clues to what he had planned further - an attack on a local school he had once attended.

Officers probing the case found some pretty disturbing things. They discovered that his search history on the internet was strewn with violent content to the point that it seemed he was fascinated by it.

He was found to have ranted about violence on online forums and some of his words were so repulsive that he was even kicked out of a gore website where he "sexualised minors". Many of his comments were about children and the sexual abuse of dead bodies.

(With inputs from agencies)