Destructive social movements “Maniacs. Killing cult” and the “World of maniacs and serial killers”: forming a criminal ideology

Objective: analysis of the semantic field of Internet publics of destructive social groups “Maniacs. The cult of murder” and “The world of maniacs and serial killers”, the reasons for the interest of teenagers and young people in these groups, the techniques used by moderators of social network pages to attract supporters and form a cult of violence among them and stimulate the commission of murders based on the research results (multidimensional content analysis of the social network pages content).

Methods: general scientific (analysis, system-structural, comparative-legal) and specific scientific methods (multidimensional content analysis of the social network pages content).

Results: based on the analysis of more than 17 thousand fragments of correspondence of participants of the movement “Maniacs. The cult of murder” and more than 34 thousand fragments of correspondence of participants of the movement “The world of maniacs and serial killers”, a semantic field was constructed, including the main topics discussed on the pages of the above-mentioned destructive social groups, methods of involving teenagers in a destructive total ideology modeling the most important spheres of life of the movements’ supporters, leveling the value of human life and turning someone else’s death into an ordinary phenomenon. It is concluded that within the framework of the destructive radical nationalist social movement “Maniacs. The cult of murder” an ideology was formed that has the following features: teleology, scientific appearance, wide audience coverage, presence of symbols and attributes, discussion of topics that have a socially negative character, using the language means that are understandable only to the community members.

Scientific novelty: the main topics discussed by participants of destructive social movements “Maniacs. The cult of murder” and “The world of maniacs and serial killers” are described and analyzed. It is proved that as a result of immersion into such content, violence and murder cease to cause natural negative emotions, feelings of disgust and empathy for the victim in teenagers. The study showed that the formation and distribution of content in publics currently takes place on behalf of the users, which, on the one hand, allows removing part of the responsibility from the moderators, and on the other hand, turns the pages of movements into a so-called self-reproducing (by terminology of Niklas Luhmann – autopoietic) system capable of self-production, i.e. its existence is ensured by the activity of the users.

Practical significance: the article materials can be useful to federal and regional authorities in implementing various aspects of youth policy, preventing sociopathic behavior of young people, ensuring the safety of educational institutions; to parents and family members of problem adolescents; and to scientists researching destructive youth network movements.

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