What fed Rudakubana’s death wish? X has become a house of horrors

Within hours of the Southport murders last July, photos of the horribly wounded young victims began circulating in private messaging groups. One Right-wing activist was so outraged by what he saw that he took to X to tell his thousands of followers about it. “It has to go off,” he fumed in a rant recorded in his car. And soon enough it did: it went off in Southport, Sunderland, Rotherham, and several other towns across the UK.

I don’t know if these particular photos made their way to the internet. But I do know that there are thousands of similar images out there in the virtual world, where, like pornography, murder videos follow you everywhere. It didn’t used to be this way: in the not-too-distant past, if you wanted to see a mutilated dead body or a violent killing, you’d have to trudge off to a video store to rent out Faces of Death. Now, you just need to go on X, where, since Elon Musk took over the platform in October 2022, “death porn” is all over the timeline whether you like it or not.

Over the last year, I have come across footage on X of a brutal stabbing of a homeless man on a street, a marauding terrorist attack in a concert hall, a stabbing rampage at a shopping outlet and, on Christmas Eve, a woman being burned alive on a New York subway train. And I didn’t even go looking for it.

Axel Rudakubana, however, was looking for it. His interest in online death porn was not merely curious but resembled a fixation. Of the tens of thousands of documents that Merseyside police sifted through on his digital devices, many related to war, terrorism and genocide, and included graphic images of dead bodies, victims of torture and beheadings. He had also downloaded (at least twice since 2021) an Al-Qaeda manual which contained an entire section on how to use a knife as an offensive weapon. On the morning of the massacre, as if to ready himself for the violence he was about to unleash, he searched for a video on X showing the stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel at a church in Sydney last April.

There is no single profile of a mass killer, beyond the fact that the vast majority are male. But there are recurring patterns. In addition to harbouring a desire to kill, most have a voracious interest in killing itself as well as in the lives and psychology of famous killers. There are several reasons for this: reading about a killer or watching CCTV footage of their atrocities holds up a mirror to their own dark desires, which I suppose makes them feel less alone in the world and less pathologically deviant. It also gives them a template for how to carry out a murder. Perhaps, too, would-be-murderers take a vicarious pleasure from watching or reading about killing, insinuating themselves in the minds and bodies of infamous death-takers.

In fact, many mass killers are highly competitive, often with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the body-counts of previous mass killers and a grudging admiration for the big-hitters. The aspiring American jihadist-now-jailbird Mohamed Alessa, for instance, was clearly envious of the mass murderer Nidal Malik Hasan, saying: “Freaking Major-Nidal-shaved-face-Palestinian-crazy guy, he’s not better than me. I’ll do twice what he did.”

Rudakubana has rather a lot in common with Jake Davison, Britain’s last infamous mass killer, who went on a shooting rampage in Plymouth in August 2021. Like Rudakubana, Davison had been diagnosed with autism, had a history of violence, had previously been referred to Prevent, and had no clear or known motive for carrying out his atrocity, much less a guiding ideology. He also shared with Rudakubana an obsession with weapons — in his case, firearms — and an empathetic interest in the minds and actions of mass killers.

It is not really surprising, however, that mass murderers are obsessed with violence. What is far more disconcerting is the idea that so many apparently ordinary people share their revolting fixations. From Plato to Burke, classical writers have long acknowledged the strange attraction of atrocious images. “Plato appears to take for granted that we have an appetite for sights of degradation and pain and mutilation,” remarked Susan Sontag, who wrote at length about the subject. “There is no spectacle we so eagerly pursue,” Burke observed in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of the Sublime and Beautiful, “as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity.” That was in 1757, well before the Netflix true crime special came into its own.

Never was this clearer than during the age of ISIS execution videos, which, though of course popular among the group’s supporters, found a devoted fandom among the self-described “death addicts” and trolls who slum it on internet shock-sites. While researching a book on the subject, I discovered that those who watch gory videos — and they’re a diverse bunch — do so for a whole range of reasons: to satisfy a morbid curiosity about death; to feel a strong emotion; to crush deep-seated fears around death and violation; to learn something about the dark corners of the world; to neutralise feelings of complacency or boredom; or to test their courage.

Others take a sadistic thrill in seeing other people suffer. No one I interviewed quite put it in that way, but one American woman in her early 20s — let’s call her Nicola (not her real name) — came close to articulating this. “I have always been interested in gore and I guess the ‘dark things’ ever since I can remember,” Nicola told me, specifying that her “favourites” were “wood chipper deaths and brutal torture”. “I don’t think I can give you a true answer as to why I enjoy it besides that I just do,” she explained, adding: “I get tingly when I see something different.”

Should atrocity videos be left to feed this desire for gore and brutality online? “Let the atrocious images haunt us,” Susan Sontag said in 2004, arguing that they perform the “vital function” of showing the evil of “what human beings are capable of doing”. Two decades later, nobody needs reminding of the presence of human evil because its extremities are now filmed and shared so widely on the internet.

Gore fans insist that this is a good thing; that atrocity videos are a form of reality news that documents crimes against humanity and can be used to bring perpetrators to justice. But even the most brazen gore fan would have to admit that watching a mass beheading is a strange way of keeping up with the news. And it’s hard to be entirely sanguine about the sheer volume of this kind of material now available online, and the ease with which so many people, including children, can access it.

Even the most trenchant free speech advocates are now expressing concern about what all of this is doing to us. Matt Walsh recently told Joe Rogan that “when I go on social media I’m constantly seeing these horrific videos of people dying… it feels like a relatively recent development”. “It’s got to mess with your mind.”

One sure way in which it messes with your mind is by warping it, tricking you into thinking that the world is far more violent and insane than it actually is. This is compounded by the highly selective way in which people tend to watch and share atrocity material. If all you do is watch videos of the destroyed bodies of countless Palestinian children killed in Israeli airstrikes, you might risk becoming desensitised to this horror. You might also start to think that Israelis and their supporters are evil. Similarly, if all you do is watch videos of African migrants robbing or stabbing people, then you might start to think that all African migrants are criminals or potential ones. As for the gore fans I interviewed, most confessed that they had a pessimistic, if not outright cynical or “blackpilled” view of the world after years of watching atrocity videos.

So did online body-horror mess with Axel Rudakubana’s mind? The easy but unconvincing answer is that it not only messed with his mind, but that it drove him to murder. This assumption draws on a long-standing and empirically paper-thin thesis about the malignant effects of violent media that is ritually invoked whenever some troubled individual commits an act of horrifying violence that defies sense and comprehension. The chief problem with this explanation, however, is that vast numbers of people have been exposed to violent media, while only a tiny number commit acts of terrible violence.

The more likely scenario is that Rudakubana’s mind was already profoundly warped to begin with, and that it was his pre-existing moral deformation that animated his interest in mass murder. Perhaps, for a time, inhaling dark matter on the internet gave him some sort of cathartic release from wanting to act on his sadistic desires. This is a less comforting explanation as it suggests that censoring information about atrocities or banning images or videos depicting them — as the government is now calling for in the wake of Rudakubana’s conviction — would likely not have stopped Rudakubana. Thrilled by thoughts of death and omnipotence, he would probably have found other outlets to indulge his perverse impulses — until he could contain them no longer.

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