TERRORISMHow a Global Online Network of White Supremacists Groomed a Teen to Kill
Neo-Nazi influencers on the social media platform Telegram created a network of chats and channels where they stoked racist, antisemitic and homophobic hate. The influencers, known as the Terrorgram Collective, targeted a teen in Slovakia and groomed him for three years to kill.
The teen entered the chat with a friendly greeting.
“Hello lads,” he typed.
“Sup,” came a reply, along with a graphic that read “KILL JEWS.” Another poster shared a GIF of Adolf Hitler shaking hands with Benito Mussolini. Someone else added a short video of a gay pride flag being set on fire. Eventually, the talk in the group turned to mass shootings and bombings.
And so in August 2019, Juraj Krajčík, then a soft-faced 16-year-old with a dense pile of brown hair, immersed himself in a loose collection of extremist chat groups and channels on the massive social media and messaging platform Telegram. This online community, which was dubbed Terrorgram, had a singular focus: inciting acts of white supremacist terrorism.
Over the next three years, Krajčík made hundreds — possibly thousands — of posts in Terrorgram chats and channels, where a handful of influential content creators steered the conversation toward violence. Day after day, post after post, these influencers cultivated Krajčík, who lived with his family in a comfortable apartment in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. They reinforced his hatreds, fine-tuned his beliefs and fed him tips, encouraging him to attack gay and Jewish people and political leaders and become, in their parlance, a “saint.”
On Oct. 12, 2022, Krajčík, armed with his father’s .45-caliber handgun, opened fire on three people sitting outside an LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava, killing two and wounding the third before fleeing the scene.
That night, as police hunted for him, Krajčík spoke on the phone with Marek Madro, a Bratislava psychologist who runs a suicide hotline and mental health crisis team. “He hoped that what he had done would shake up society,” recalled Madro in an interview, adding that the teen was “very scared.”
During the call, Krajčík kept repeating phrases from his manifesto, according to Madro. The 65-page document, written in crisp English and illustrated with graphics and photos, offered a detailed justification for his lethal actions. “Destroy the degenerates!” he wrote, before encouraging people to attack pride parades, gay and lesbian activists, and LGBTQ+ bars.
Eventually Krajčík, standing in a small grove of trees alongside a busy roadway, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
The next day, Terrorgram influencers were praising the killer and circulating a PDF of his manifesto on Telegram.
“We thank him from the bottom of our hearts and will never forget his sacrifice,” stated one post written by a Terrorgram leader in California. “FUCKING HAIL, BROTHER!!!”
The story of Krajčík’s march to violence shows the murderous reach of the online extremists, who operated outside the view of local law enforcement. To police at the time, the killings seemed like the act of a lone gunman rather than what they were: the culmination of a coordinated recruiting effort that spanned two continents.
ProPublica and the PBS series FRONTLINE, along with the Slovakian newsroom Investigative Center of Jan Kuciak, pieced together the story behind Krajčík’s evolution from a troubled teenager to mass shooter. We identified his user name on Telegram, which allowed us to sift through tens of thousands of now-deleted Telegram posts that had not previously been linked to him. Our team retraced his final hours, interviewing investigators, experts and victims in Slovakia, and mapped the links between Krajčík and the extremists in Europe and the U.S. who helped to shape him.
The Terrorgram network has been gutted in recent months by the arrests of its leaders in North America and Europe. Telegram declined repeated requests to make its executives available for interviews but in a statement said, “Calls for violence from any group are not tolerated on our platform.” The company also said that since 2023 it has stepped up moderation practices.
Still, at a time when other mainstream social media companies such as X and Meta are cutting back on policing their online content, experts say the violent neo-Nazis that populated Telegram’s chats and channels will likely find an online home elsewhere.
At first, Krajčík didn’t fit in with the Terrorgrammers. In one early post in 2019, he argued that the white nationalist movement would benefit from large public protests. The idea wasn’t well received.
“Rallies won’t do shit,” replied one poster.
Another told the teen that instead of organizing a rally, he should start murdering politicians, journalists and drag performers. “You need a mafia state of mind,” the person wrote.
A.C. Thompson covers hate crimes and racial extremism for ProPublica. James Bandler is a reporter at ProPublica.Lukáš Diko is the editor-in-chief of the Ján Kuciak Investigative Center. This story was originally published by ProPublica.
