Written evidence submitted by onEvidence Ltd (COM0046)

1.       Introduction

onEvidence Ltd is pleased to submit this evidence to the Home Affairs Committee’s inquiry into new forms of extremism. This submission introduces the Hybrid Decentralised Extremist Networks (HDEN) framework,[1] a strategic-conceptual intervention developed to provide a more precise, flexible, and operationally useful lens for understanding and addressing contemporary extremist threats. This framework is designed to replace ambiguous terms such as "Nihilistic Violent Extremism" (NVE)[2] and offers a clearer understanding of modern radicalisation dynamics. HDEN shifts the analytical focus from solely examining why individuals radicalise to comprehending how decentralised ecosystems cultivate, amplify, and operationalise violence across ideological boundaries.

2.       The Hybrid Decentralised Extremist Networks (HDEN) Framework

HDEN are tactically coherent yet leaderless constellations of individuals, micro-groups, and symbolic subcultures whose cohesion arises from performative convergence rather than doctrinal belief or hierarchical command. These networks orchestrate harm across decentralised platforms through symbolic cues, gamified initiation, and escalating acts of transgression.

The framework addresses three key dimensions:

• Hybridisation: HDEN combine diverse ideological motifs with psychological drivers, blending elements such as esotericism, gamification, misogyny, white supremacy, irony, and violence-as-performance. These fusions are instrumental in appealing to disaffected individuals through layered transgression and symbolic status.
• Decentralisation: Unlike traditional hierarchical models, HDEN operate through nodal swarms, transient cells, and lone actors, making them inherently difficult to map or disrupt. Authority is ambient, distributed through lore, initiation rituals, and gamified status systems.
• Network Logic: These groups are intrinsically linked to the internet, which serves as their social infrastructure, behavioural archive, and ideological delivery system. HDEN orchestrate harm and reproduce symbolic violence at scale through platform fluidity, memetic branding (e.g., terrorwave), anonymised forums, and ephemeral media.

2.1 Limitations of Existing Frameworks

Traditional frameworks often struggle to grasp the complex dynamics of modern radicalisation. The Nihilistic Violent Extremism (NVE) label, for instance, despite being an attempt to address emerging threats, is critiqued for its conceptual ambiguity and limited operational utility.[3] NVE’s definition often paradoxically suggests an ideological goal while aiming to describe violence lacking such motives, leading to imprecision and the risk of becoming a catch-all category that blunts practitioners' understanding. It also tends to conflate aesthetics with ideology and grievance with belief, creating diagnostic clutter and potentially over-securitising edgelord subculture by misclassifying identity experimentation as a serious threat. Importantly, NVE fails to capture the hybrid and evolving nature of emergent online formations, where coherence stems from aesthetic and performative alignment rather than a fixed belief system.

While models like Composite Violent Extremism (CoVE) introduce valuable ideas around ideological blending, they often overlook network structure and aesthetic radicalisation. Similarly, although Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) present a significant threat for extremist organisation and financing by bypassing traditional surveillance and regulation, the HDEN framework offers a distinct lens by highlighting how network dynamics are driven by aesthetic radicalisation, gamified initiation, and interpersonal grooming as core harm mechanics.

3.       Responding to the Inquiry's Terms of Reference

This section outlines how the HDEN framework addresses the Committee’s inquiry questions.

3.1 Recent Trends

Trends in the growth of extremism and radicalisation in the UK & Factors contributing to a rise in extremism: The HDEN framework offers a comprehensive explanation for several key trends in the growth of extremism and radicalisation. We have observed that extremist groups are increasingly leveraging the scale and reach of Online Social Networks (OSNs) to expand their activities, recruit members, and radicalise individuals. The unprecedented volume of data on these platforms, while of interest for identifying patterns, has also made mainstream platforms like Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube potent tools for extremist communities to disseminate propaganda to vulnerable populations. The HDEN framework is a living model designed to keep pace with these evolving digital patterns of radicalisation and provides a means to understand this complex, decentralised threat.

Key characteristics of HDENs that drive these trends include:

• Aesthetic-Driven Radicalisation: Many HDEN actors engage through visual cultures like terrorwave, gorecore, or esoteric fascism, which function as ideological proxies for affiliation, recruitment, and alignment without explicit belief statements. These aesthetics act as soft entry points, radicalising through affect, style, and repetition, drawing vulnerable individuals, particularly boys, seeking power, identity, or community.
• Decentralised & Rhizomatic Structure: HDEN operate through nodal swarms, transient cells, and fluid alignments, making them resilient to disruption because they lack central leadership.
• Membership Fluidity & Transversality: Participants frequently move between online subcultures (e.g., neo-Nazi Discord users engaging in incel forums), adapting personas and accruing symbolic capital without formal initiation.
• Lone Actors & Constellational Violence: Individuals often labelled as "lone actors" are spectrally embedded within broader symbolic constellations. Their violence is stylised, mimetic, and choreographed through aesthetic alignment with prior acts, referencing previous transgressions as status markers.
• Intersection with Incel Ideology: Incel grievance culture, with themes of sexual entitlement and misanthropy, acts as an accelerant within HDEN, appearing alongside other motifs and expanding recruitment for gendered violence.
• Grooming & Exploitation of Vulnerable Individuals: HDEN manipulate younger users through flattery, in-jokes, and escalating demands, often cloaked in irony or edgelord humour. This involves older actors strategically leveraging age gaps to cultivate disposable younger affiliates as tactical resources. This constitutes a form of decentralised psychological warfare against minors.
• Gamification & Status Signalling: This is a key driver of the growth of extremism among young people, which is a major focus of the inquiry. In HDENs, violence and transgressive acts are often gamified, with actors earning "clout" or prestige through symbolic escalation and the creation of transgressive content. This includes initiation-by-crime rituals and the use of "cut signs". Past perpetrators are mythologised into "digital saints" via a "Saints Culture," which provides a strong incentive for replication and escalating harm. This gamified pursuit of infamy creates a self-validating system that directly contributes to the radicalisation of young people by offering a clear path to social reward and recognition within these networks.
• Hybrid Harms: Terrorism Meets CSE and Psychological Warfare: HDEN weaponise a disturbing convergence of terrorism, child sexual exploitation (CSE), and psychological manipulation. For example, victims (often minors) are coerced into acts of self-harm or sharing sexual imagery, which serve as digital trophies and status currency.

These characteristics align with the 2024 MI5 annual threat update, which highlighted a threefold increase in terrorism investigations involving individuals under 18, with 32 arrests for terror offences in 2024.[4]

Approaches for identifying and intervening to prevent young people being drawn into extremism: HDEN enables earlier safeguarding by identifying harm-signals, such as aesthetic markers, gamified initiation, or grooming cues, before acts escalate. Effective approaches include:

• Training Symbolic Literacy: Equipping frontline staff to recognise early markers of symbolic affiliation, such as cut signs, transgressive avatars, prestige-chasing rituals, and recruitment memes. This involves decoding the grammar of performance (ritualised behaviours and aesthetic cues that signal alignment).
• Bridging Relational Insight with Symbolic Precision: Understanding how grooming plays out in status economies, where older affiliates groom younger participants via role-based seduction (e.g., becoming a handler, archiving violence, earning clout). Intervention should occur at the point of symbolic coercion.
• Disrupting Harm Performance Loops: Prioritising relational reconnection over criminalisation for young people caught in cycles of symbolic enactment (e.g., posting gore, adopting identifiers, performing loyalty).
• Avoiding Overreach into Subcultural Territory: Differentiating between normative edgelord aesthetic play and performative allegiance to operational harm, to avoid alienating young people and obstructing mental health interventions.

The impact of new technologies, such as AI, on efforts to combat online extremism is marked by a fundamental shift in the nature of extremist movements. New technologies have empowered these groups to become HDEN. Research highlights that extremists are leveraging new technologies, including AI, to advance their operations, with Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) being a key example. [5] These DAOs offer both practical advantages, such as evading surveillance and financial oversight, and ideological appeal by providing an unregulated space that attracts individuals seeking to operate outside established systems. This confirms that the challenge is not merely about content moderation, but about the exploitation of new technological architectures.

In response, the HDEN framework proposes a new approach that leverages a systems-level understanding of risk. Instead of focusing solely on the content, it prioritises how new technologies facilitate network dynamics driven by aesthetic radicalisation, gamified initiation, and interpersonal grooming. This framework equips practitioners and moderators to:

• Track Mobilisation Patterns: It allows for the identification of network formation and movement as they emerge on new technological platforms.
• Decode Symbolic Signalling: It provides a grammar for understanding the fluid, aesthetic-driven communication that new technologies enable, moving beyond a sole reliance on traditional text analysis.
• Disrupt Networks: By understanding these core harm mechanics, the framework facilitates more precise interventions, enabling practitioners and moderators to disrupt networks before they translate into real-world violence.

Essentially, the HDEN framework reframes the problem of online extremism as a technological and structural one, and offers a solution that harnesses data-driven insights to meet the challenges presented by the next generation of decentralised threats.

To what extent do ‘com networks’ represent a new form of online extremism? How effective are existing interventions at identifying extremism threats arising from ‘com networks’?: "The Com" (The Community) represents a significant new form of online extremism and is a central concept within the HDEN framework. It is a decentralised online ecosystem, often influenced by nihilistic ideologies, involved in interconnected harms across three primary pillars: Cyber Com (cybercrime, doxing), Offline Com (real-world violence, swatting), and Sextortion Com (child exploitation, coercion, CSAM).

The 764 network and its affiliated offshoots (such as 676, Court, Harm Nation) are prime examples of HDEN operating within and shaping the symbolic logic of The Com. The FBI has identified 764 as a "tier one" terrorist threat, with over 250 active investigations across all 55 field offices, underlining its scale and persistence. These networks exhibit hybrid harms that converge CSE, symbolic violence, and psychological manipulation, enacted through encrypted lorebooks, initiation rituals, and digital trophy archiving.

Existing interventions are often ineffective at identifying threats from Com networks due to several factors:

• HDENs operate through visual cultures and symbolic grammars that can easily evade keyword-based content moderation systems, demanding a shift to "symbolic literacy".
• Their rhizomatic, post-organisational structure makes traditional case mapping fragmented and disruption efforts difficult as there is no central node to dismantle.
• They exhibit platform agnosticism and tactical migration, moving fluidly across mainstream platforms, gaming servers, encrypted messaging apps, and alt-chan boards to obscure activities and rapidly reconstitute.
• The gamification of violence and pursuit of "gamified infamy" create self-validating systems that incentivise escalating harm, which traditional frameworks struggle to address.
• The convergence of harms (terrorism, CSE, psychological manipulation) and the practice of intergenerational grooming challenge conventional safeguarding protocols.

3.2 Remedies

Changes required for Prevent to manage cases involving mixed, unclear, and unstable ideologies (MUU) and new mechanisms of radicalisation such as online platforms: Prevent must evolve to manage these complex cases effectively. HDEN offers a more robust framework than current MUU classifications, which often lack the structural insight needed to map how actors mobilise and persist.

• Retire Overbroad Taxonomies: Categories like NVE, which pathologise incoherence without operational clarity, should be retired. HDEN equips policymakers with actionable typologies that reflect decentralisation, symbolic escalation, and aestheticised harm.
• Embed HDEN into Strategic Threat Assessments: National security doctrines should adopt HDEN’s structural dimensions (hybridity, symbolic alignment, gamified status economies) as core risk indicators, as these often manifest earlier than ideological declarations.
• Refocus Policy Around Harm Ecosystems: Policy should target network architecture, platform migration, and performance-based recruitment patterns across youth and adult actors, moving beyond ideology-based attribution.
• Train Symbolic Literacy: Equip Prevent practitioners and frontline staff (e.g., youth workers, social care teams, educators) to recognise early markers of symbolic affiliation and decode how grooming plays out in status economies. This enables intervention at the point of symbolic coercion.
• Platform Governance: Platforms must move beyond reactive keyword matching to detect symbolic continuity (e.g., shared avatars, lore citations) across platforms, interrupt gamified harm economies, and protect against intergenerational symbolic grooming through dynamic age-gap flagging and coercion pattern detection.

Are any mechanisms other than Prevent required to address mixed, unclear and unstable ideologies?: While Prevent is important, HDEN highlights the need for cross-disciplinary interventions that connect safeguarding, Prevent, and national security efforts. Mechanisms beyond Prevent, or a significant recalibration of existing ones, include:

• Law Enforcement & Intelligence: Adoption of symbolic cue recognition (e.g., "cut sign" imagery, lorebook fragments, initiation-by-crime scripts) as pre-ideological threat signals. This enables earlier cross-silo coordination between counter-terrorism and cyber units. Legal strategies should be grounded in symbolic economies, coercive role distribution, and decentralised intent.
• Education & Digital Literacy: Rebuilding digital citizenship around symbolic literacy, teaching young people to interpret how harm is stylised, signalled, and socially rewarded online. This includes empowering students as "cultural decoders" and creating protective countercultures.
• Targeted Intervention Guides: Providing strategies for professionals, including insights into pre-existing psychological, neurodevelopmental, and social vulnerabilities that make individuals susceptible to extremist influence.
• Collaboration with Technology Companies: The HDEN framework highlights that online platforms are integral to the radicalisation process, serving as social infrastructure and ideological delivery systems. Effective intervention requires improved collaboration with technology companies. This goes beyond reactive content moderation and requires platforms to adopt a symbolic literacy approach to governance, actively detecting and disrupting the fluid, aesthetic-driven communication, gamified harm economies, and intergenerational grooming that enable HDENs to flourish. By sharing insights and developing joint strategies, law enforcement and tech companies can more effectively identify and interrupt HDEN networks across platforms.

What factors will determine whether or not new Youth Diversion Orders would be effective in preventing young people from becoming radicalised?: The effectiveness of Youth Diversion Orders will depend on their ability to account for the unique dynamics of HDEN and focus on relational, trauma-informed interventions.

• Trauma-Informed Responses: Orders must acknowledge the complex psychological impact of decentralised psychological warfare against minors and provide comprehensive support for victims of convergent harms (terrorism, CSE, psychological manipulation).
• Focus on Symbolic Coercion: Interventions should occur at the point of symbolic coercion, addressing grooming hierarchies and intergenerational obfuscation where older actors exploit age gaps.
• Disrupting Gamified Harm: Orders should aim to break the gamified feedback loops of harm-for-recognition rather than merely criminalising young people for aesthetic play or status-seeking behaviours.
• Relational Reconnection: Prioritising relational reconnection over punitive measures, especially for those caught in cycles of symbolic enactment.
• Precision in Distinction: Diversion orders must be nuanced enough to differentiate normative aesthetic play or identity exploration from genuine network alignment and operational harm.

3.3 Strategic Implications

The HDEN framework is not merely an academic refinement; it is a strategic recalibration for national security, child protection, community safeguarding, and digital governance. It shifts the analytical lens from attribution to architecture, capturing how grooming, gamification, and visual culture bind loose actors into operational wholes. Adopting HDEN offers substantial practical implications:

• Operationally, agencies can disrupt patterns of mobilisation and symbolic signalling rather than chasing affiliations that dissolve on scrutiny.
• Preventatively, it enables earlier safeguarding by identifying harm-signals before acts escalate.
• Legally, it supports prosecution and platform governance that acknowledge dispersed culpability and the role of symbolic influence in networked harm.
• Strategically, it reduces resource drift and policy inertia by recognising these threats as structural ecosystems, not ideological outliers.

Conclusion

The rise of hybrid, decentralised extremist formations necessitates a strategic recalibration in our approach to national security, child protection, and public safety. By shifting the analytical lens from rigid ideological taxonomies to a systems-level understanding of networked harm, the HDEN framework offers a precise, flexible, and operationally useful tool for this purpose.

To effectively combat these evolving threats, we must adopt a multi-faceted approach. We recommend retiring overbroad categories like NVE in favour of typologies that reflect the structural dimensions of these threats, such as hybridity and gamified status economies. Policy should be refocused to target network architectures and performance-based recruitment patterns, rather than relying solely on ideology-based attribution. Furthermore, true effectiveness requires cross-silo collaboration, embedding symbolic literacy into the training of law enforcement, educators, and social care teams to enable earlier intervention.

By adopting the HDEN framework, we can move beyond simply reacting to extremist violence and instead anticipate, track, and disrupt the core mechanisms that enable it to spread. This approach makes the disturbing convergence of terrorism, child sexual exploitation, and psychological manipulation legible to practitioners, equipping them to act not just earlier, but more coherently against the evolving architectures of violent extremism.

Sept 2025