Social media may be inspiration for some people to commit crimes.

Such acts may have a great deal to do with the brain's response to stimuli of high intensity.

The Internet and the myriad devices attached to it certainly have their uses, and they are extremely popular. In any public space, practically everybody's eyeballs are virtually glued to the potentially fictitious reality dancing across the screens of their cell phones, and similar trends are ubiquitous when they’re at home as well.

Yet this omnipresent virtual world has a dark side. Many people, especially young people, have been inspired to commit crimes in imitation of what they've seen on social media, ranging from first-person shooter games to the veneration of homicidal imaginary entities. There are, of course, many possible contributing causal factors in such cases; but violent media have been implicated in a significant (p < .001) 2.45-fold increase in reported violent behavior with each incremental increase in baseline violent media diet (Ybarra and colleagues, 2022). Imitative processes with reference to violent social media are also well established (for example, Shah and Kaushik, 2025; Gerbner, Jahlly, and Kilbourne, 2014). There are a great many examples: in the 2024 Tooele homicide in Utah, a child killed his father with weapons and methods from a Call of Duty game, which the child frequently played (KUTV-CBS, 2024). In 1998, a teenager, with the help of his cousin, murdered his mother with knives and a screwdriver, citing Scream and Scream 2 as their inspiration (for example, Morin, 1999). An archetypal example of media influence on juvenile violence is probably to be found in the 2014 Slender Man attempted homicide (for example, Davey and Yaccino, 2014), in which two girls stabbed a classmate nineteen times as a kind of sacrifice and affirmation of this imaginary but sinister “creepypasta” character.

Not everyone starts to believe in the malign reality of what they may see on social media, of course, and one frequently encounters some reluctance to consider the people who do; it is perhaps not surprising that media might not focus........

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