True Crime to True Cringe

Overview

Through our intelligence monitoring, Graphika conducts ongoing and regular examinations of several violent extremist online communities. Our past reports have examined communities that intersect with nihilistic and accelerationist violent extremism, such as the Com, or that glorify incidents of mass violence and the attackers that perpetrate them, such as members of the Edgesphere 1 and the True Crime Community (TCC).

As part of this monitoring, we have observed the emergence and spread of actors and content tied to a violent subset of the TCC that refers to itself as the True Cringe Community. Members of the True Cringe Community congregate around an eponymous hashtag, #TrueCringeCommunity, and mock the broader TCC, even while they participate in it.

The majority of the TCC 3 does not engage in violence and participates in non-extremist online conversations about criminal and violent incidents, even as members fantasize about or compliment perpetrators based on their looks or perceived mental states. The community’s focus on glorifying perpetrators of mass violence, including school shooters, has contributed to violent acts, with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue describing the TCC in October 2025 as "one of the most significant contributors to acts of public violence in the United States and around the world.” In addition, as extremism researchers have argued, the TCC’s participatory and “self-sustaining” culture, where attacks by members create new points of engagement, creates an environment with a non-linear radicalization pathway.

The True Cringe Community takes the TCC’s activities a step further. Members self-identify as “LARPers” (live-action roleplayers) even while they engage in violent acts and regularly encourage others to commit acts of mass violence. Segments of the community also use extremist symbolism and venerate perpetrators from various ideological, racial, or religious motivations, leveraging them to come off as “edgy” and transgressive – a behavior we have also observed among violent TCC and Edgesphere actors.

This report is based on a qualitative analysis of more than a year of our monitoring of the True Cringe Community. It seeks to provide insights into the following:

• How the True Cringe Community intersects with the broader TCC.
• The behaviors True Cringe members use to spread violence-glorifying messaging and evade moderation across the social media platforms on which they congregate, including TikTok and, to a lesser extent, Instagram.
• The indicators of the community’s content, including how it overlaps or deviates from the broader TCC.
• How violent subsets of the TCC, like True Cringe, can act as a bridge between the broader TCC and more extreme violent subcultures within the Edgesphere and potentially exacerbate radicalization.