A minor from East Flanders was brought before a youth court last year and placed in detention for his role in a sadistic online network promoting violence. The individual is reportedly a boy aged 16 or 17, according to Het Laatste Nieuws. The East Flanders public prosecutor’s office declined to comment on the case, but it was confirmed on Saturday from a reliable source that the council chamber upheld the minor’s detention. The network in question is called “No Lives Matter.” The online discussion group glorifies violence and circulates manuals for carrying out attacks or acts of violence against randomly chosen victims. The alleged founder of the movement, Justin B., aged 25, was arrested last summer in the Netherlands. According to Het Laatste Nieuws, the minor arrested in East Flanders had taken over from the Dutch founder.
A manual for sadism
“Render the victim helpless and begin filming the abuse”; “Anyone wishing to carry out a terrorist attack must ensure they have a sturdy knife.” These are just a few examples drawn from the manuals circulating within the network, to which our colleagues at HLN gained access. Practical guides to violence, running to several dozen pages and written with the cold efficiency of an IKEA instruction booklet — but applied to the making of homemade bombs, car bombs, or the administration of poison.
To understand how a Belgian minor could end up in such a network, one must look at the phenomenon known as “the Com” — a network of small online groups scattered across the world, communicating via platforms such as Telegram and Discord. Members deliberately target vulnerable teenagers, gain their trust, and then coerce them, through sextortion — blackmail using sexually explicit material — into self-harming or committing violence against themselves or others. These acts are filmed or livestreamed, then used as fresh blackmail material or to gain higher status within the collective.
Nazism and self-harm
No Lives Matter is an even more extreme offshoot of these communities, centred on terror, in which violence and death are openly glorified and where manuals describing attacks and acts of violence against randomly chosen victims are widely circulated. Numerous references to Nazi ideology appear throughout these communities, from swastikas to Hitler salutes. Within this online subculture, sadism, nihilism and extremist ideologies frequently intertwine, against a backdrop of self-harm and demands for proof of loyalty and submission. It is, however, difficult to determine whether all the videos circulating on these networks are genuine or have been generated by artificial intelligence.
Acts of violence
Both the Coordination Unit for Threat Analysis (Ocam) and Child Focus have issued warnings about online discussion groups promoting violence, such as “No Lives Matter” and “764” — the latter referring to the American postcode of the founder of another movement within this sadistic sphere. In August 2025, an 18-year-old launched a livestream in Newark, in the United States, before repeatedly stabbing a random man with a knife. The teenager was a member of No Lives Matter. In Sweden, two 14-year-old members of No Lives Matter stabbed several people in 2024 and 2025 while filming their actions.
