The FBI has designated an online group, many of its members adolescents or children younger than 13, as an “extremist” threat.
Called “764,” the FBI has labeled the group “Nihilistic Violent Extremists,” a new classification for domestic terrorists created by the Bureau last year, as I first reported.
Publicly, the FBI casts these investigations as a crusade to protect the children from predatory adults. What they rarely mention is that many of the suspects are children themselves. To obscure this ugly reality, law enforcement portrays itself as merely focused on social media and gaming platforms — ones that just so happen to be popular among children, like Roblox.
The focus on child gamers is so great that law enforcement are privately employing Gen Z slang like “clout chasing” and “aura farming” in its intelligence reporting (see below).
Because minors’ identities are not disclosed in court records, we have no idea how many children the FBI is investigating. (The Bureau has not responded to my request for comment at the time of this writing.)
One rare acknowledgement of the presence of children in these groups came from the FBI’s Boston Field Office, which in February issued a statement referring to 764’s “juvenile predators”; another FBI public service announcement described a similar group’s (“The Com”) members as “between 11 and 25 years old.”
Hellbound and Down 