Subheadline: The web was built as an open “universal space.” Thirty years later, a borderless cruelty economy is being treated like a national security threat, and Canada just drew a new line.

3 Narratives News | December 12, 2025

The Screenshot at 2:13 a.m.

The modern shakedown arrives softly. A notification. A username that looks like static. A stranger who already knows your school, your friends, your face. The message is not a threat at first. It’s an invitation to “prove” something, to do something small, to send something that feels private but not yet catastrophic. Then the tone turns. The exchange becomes a countdown.

In 1996, the internet’s dreamers imagined a borderless public square beyond the reach of the old world’s governments. In 2025, a new kind of borderless predator has made that promise feel naïve. This month, Canada did something unprecedented for a phenomenon that lives mostly in chat rooms, DMs, and shadowy servers: it formally listed a network known as “764” as a terrorist entity.

From Mischief to Coercion to a Listed Threat

To understand why a country would deploy the language of national security against a group that recruits online, you have to rewind to the web’s earliest years, and then follow the trail of harm as it evolves, mutates, professionalizes, and spreads.

A web designed to be open

In the late 1980s, Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal for what became the World Wide Web argued for a “universal linked information system,” emphasizing generality and portability over “fancy graphics.” A few years later, he explained why openness mattered:

“You can’t propose… a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”

That ethos was not merely technical. It became cultural. In 1996, as governments debated how to regulate online speech, John Perry Barlow’s famous manifesto addressed “Governments of the Industrial World” and declared: “You have no sovereignty where we gather.” For a generation, the web was sold as liberation, a new commons, a tool that would flatten hierarchies and expand opportunity.

The first widely publicized “virtual” harm

The earliest warning signs were dismissed as weirdness, not crime. But by 1993, the Village Voice published Julian Dibbell’s account of the “Bungle Affair” in a text-based virtual world called LambdaMOO, an incident later described in academic literature as

“the first widely publicized rape in cyberspace.”

The details are from an older internet, but the pattern is modern: a digital environment that feels unreal, a violation that feels intimate, and a community unprepared for what “harm” means when it is mediated by code.

When “only words” became a body count

By the early 2000s, the internet had moved from an adult hobby to a teenage habitat. The harm followed. In 2003, thirteen-year-old Ryan Halligan died by suicide after bullying that included cruel instant messages. His father later described discovering the archived conversations after Ryan’s death, and the case became an early, widely cited landmark in what schools and media started calling “cyberbullying.”

In 2006, fourteen-year-old Megan Meier died by suicide after harassment connected to a fake MySpace persona. The legal system struggled to respond, and lawmakers moved to update harassment laws to explicitly cover electronic communications. The lesson, then, was that the old statutes were not built for new tools, and the lag between harm and law was itself a multiplier.

The era of organized coercion

What began as taunting and humiliation gradually hardened into systems: doxxing, swatting, sextortion, blackmail markets, “packs” of harassers, and money-making operations that treat fear as a product. In the most extreme cases, groups learned to turn the victim’s own digital life into leverage: screenshots, intimate images, voice clips, deepfakes, contact lists, and location clues.

The shift is not just a scale. It is structured. Once a behavior becomes repeatable, it becomes teachable. Once it becomes teachable, it becomes recruitable. And once it becomes recruitable, it begins to resemble a network rather than a lone offender.

What is “764,” and why did Canada list it

Canadian officials describe 764 as a decentralized, transnational online network tied to what they call “nihilistic violent extremist” ( to learn more about this term ) activity. Authorities say it targets vulnerable people, including minors, using grooming, manipulation, and extortion, with a documented pattern of coercing victims into self-harm, sexual acts, and other abuse for control, “content,” and status.

Canada’s listing also points to real-world incidents associated with the network, including a case in Alberta involving a 14-year-old charged with child pornography offenses and explosives possession, alongside international cases cited in government materials.

This matters because Canada’s terrorist-entity listing is not symbolic. The federal government says listing can trigger asset freezes, criminalize certain forms of support, and impose reporting obligations on financial institutions, while enabling investigators to treat the network as more than “online harassment” and to pursue it with tools designed for organized threats.

Is Canada “the first”?

Canada is not inventing a new law from scratch. The terrorist-entity listing regime has existed for years, and Canada has previously listed groups that were not conventional battlefield organizations, including transnational criminal organizations. What appears new here is the target: a threat whose recruitment, organization, and core operations are natively online, and whose victims are often minors. Canadian reporting on the decision describes it as the first time any country has listed 764 as a terrorist organization.

Narrative 1: The Web as a Promise of Freedom

There is a reason the early internet sounded like a frontier. People spoke about it with the reverence once reserved for printing presses and railroads. A network built to route around censorship and failure was also built to route around control. The pioneers believed that openness was not a bug; it was the point.

From this perspective, Canada’s move is understandable but dangerous. The urge to fight a new cruelty economy can become a permission slip for a broader crackdown: more surveillance, more content policing, more database sharing, more pressure on encrypted services, more incentives for private companies to become deputized censors.

Barlow’s language still echoes in the minds of civil libertarians: “You have no sovereignty where we gather.” Not because they want predators protected, but because they know that once governments build tools to pursue the worst actors, those tools rarely remain limited to the worst actors. The machinery of enforcement, like the machinery of data, tends to expand.

This side of the argument also insists on a truth that is uncomfortable but real: the web’s openness produced extraordinary benefits. It lowered the cost of publishing and organizing. It created new livelihoods. It let immigrants call home for pennies. It made knowledge portable. It gave small businesses a global storefront. The same architecture that allows a coercion ring to operate across borders also allows a dissident to survive across borders.

So the question becomes: how do you stop the nightmare without dismantling the dream?

Narrative 2: The Web as a Borderless Crime Scene

There is another way to tell the last thirty years, and it begins with power, not freedom.

The web did not stay a decentralized commons. It consolidated. A small number of platforms came to dominate attention, advertising, and distribution, and that dominance reshaped economies. In the United States, analysts project that Google, Meta, and Amazon together will account for roughly 59% of total ad revenues. In search advertising, Google alone is projected to take the overwhelming majority of U.S. revenue.

That concentration matters because it changes what the internet is. It is no longer a set of protocols; it is a set of chokepoints. And once you have chokepoints, you have winners, and you have the rest.

The retail story offers a useful parallel. Analysts estimate Amazon will represent about 40% of U.S. e-commerce sales, and U.S. store-closure forecasts for 2025 have reached numbers that would have sounded unimaginable in the 1990s. It is not that one company singlehandedly “destroyed” physical retail, but the trendline is clear: digital convenience and platform scale punish the middle, and reward the giants.

Now, place crime inside that same architecture. The online underworld learned the logic of platforms too: recruit, scale, optimize, outsource. The modern extortionist does not need a neighborhood. He needs a server. The modern predator does not need a van. He needs a phone camera, a fake profile, and a victim’s fear.

Russia provides the most visible example of how borderless crime thrives when enforcement is uneven. The LockBit ransomware enterprise, for example, became one of the world’s most prolific extortion operations, with U.S. authorities charging alleged developers and describing a business model that treated cyber extortion as a scalable service. Western analysts have long argued that ransomware operations flourish in jurisdictions where the risk of arrest is low.

And then there is 764, a network that does not merely steal money. It steals the self. It treats humiliation as currency. In U.S. court filings, prosecutors describe “lorebooks” and status incentives, a system where proof of control becomes a form of reputation. In public reporting and law enforcement accounts, the network has been linked to cases spanning multiple countries, with victims coerced into self-harm and sexual exploitation, and offenders often shockingly young themselves.

From this viewpoint, Canada’s decision is overdue. If a network functions like an organized threat, recruits like an organized threat, and harms like an organized threat, then treating it as a high-level organized threat is not overreach; it is realism.

The Silent Story Beneath Both

The quiet truth beneath the freedom story and the crackdown story is that the primary battleground is not ideology. It is adolescence.

The victims most often described in reporting on 764 and similar networks are minors. That means the weapon is not just violence. It is shame, belonging, curiosity, loneliness, fear of parents, fear of peers, fear of being exposed. The internet did not invent these vulnerabilities. It industrialized them.

There is also a second uncomfortable truth: the perpetrators can be minors too. The same machinery that makes a victim reachable makes a teen recruitable. Some networks use status games, dares, and escalating demands to turn a curious kid into an accomplice. The harm becomes a pipeline.

Canada’s listing does not magically solve that pipeline. But it may help in three practical ways.

First, it creates friction. When a group is listed, institutions must treat it differently. Funds can be frozen. Certain forms of participation and facilitation become prosecutable in a more direct way. Banks and other entities face heightened obligations to disclose property tied to listed groups, and the ecosystem becomes less hospitable to anyone trying to monetize or materially support the network.

Second, it shifts urgency. Law enforcement agencies and international partners often triage threats. A formal listing changes the priority stack. It also signals to platforms that this is not merely “harmful content” but a coordinated coercion threat requiring a faster, more serious response.

Third, it dignifies the victims. Language matters. For years, families were told to treat digital cruelty like a school problem, a parenting problem, a “screen time” problem. But when the state names a network as an organized threat, it implicitly accepts that some victims are living through something closer to captivity than conflict.

Still, the hardest work remains offline: equipping parents, schools, and young people with the confidence to disclose early, to save evidence, to report quickly, and to understand that shame is a tool used by predators, not a verdict on the victim.

In the 1990s, the web promised opportunity for all. In the 2020s, the task is humbler and more urgent: to make a universal space safe enough to inhabit. Canada’s listing of 764 is a sign that governments are beginning to treat these borderless coercion networks as something more than “bullying.” At the end of this story, there is a name for that shift. It is the moment the world starts calling it what it has become: online terrorism.

Key Takeaways

• Canada has formally listed “764” as a terrorist entity, describing it as a decentralized, transnational network linked to grooming, extortion, and coercion-based abuse.
• The legal change is not a brand-new statute, but a new application: using national-security-style tools against a natively online coercion network.
• Early internet ideals emphasized openness and a “universal space,” but platform consolidation and borderless coercion markets have reshaped the web’s reality.
• Canada says listing can enable asset freezes, criminalize certain forms of support, and add reporting obligations, potentially disrupting networks that thrive on frictionless online movement.
• The silent story is youth vulnerability: shame, belonging, and fear are the primary weapons, and early disclosure remains the most effective defense.

Questions This Article Answers

1. What is 764?

   Canadian officials describe 764 as a decentralized, transnational online network associated with “nihilistic violent extremist” activity and coercion-based exploitation, including grooming, extortion, and forcing victims into self-harm or sexual abuse.

2. Is Canada the first country to list 764 as a terrorist entity?

   Canadian reporting and official materials describe Canada as the first country to formally list 764 as a terrorist organization, even though multiple countries are investigating related cases.

3. Does listing create “special powers”?

   Listing does not create an entirely new legal system, but it activates powerful tools: asset freezing, criminal liability for certain kinds of material support, and heightened reporting obligations that can help investigators disrupt the network’s infrastructure and funding.

4. How did this problem evolve from “cyberbullying” to organized coercion?

   Early online harassment was often treated as speech or mischief. Over time, repeatable tactics—doxxing, sextortion, blackmail, and reputation attacks—became systematized, recruitable, and transnational, resembling organized crime rather than isolated cruelty.

5. What should parents and schools do if a teen is being targeted?

   Encourage early disclosure, save evidence (screenshots, usernames, timestamps), avoid negotiating with the predator, and report promptly to law enforcement and relevant platforms. Shame thrives in secrecy; safety starts with speaking early.

Process & AI-Use Disclosure

How we reported this: This article synthesizes publicly available government statements, court filings, and reputable newsroom reporting about 764 and the evolution of online coercion networks. We focused on evidence-based claims and avoided repeating operational details that could enable abuse.

AI-use note: We used AI tools to accelerate research, organize timelines, and surface primary-source references. A human editor wrote and verified the final narrative, and we remain accountable for accuracy. Read our policy: /how-we-use-ai/. Corrections: /corrections/.