Nihilistic Violence Aesthetics in Public Online Communication: A Non-Predictive Theoretical Framework for Interpreting Hybridized Violent Signaling

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression, [date of publication], https://doi.org/10.1080/19434472.2026.2757032 Abstract Online violent communication can take forms that are ironic, meme-based, aesthetically stylized, and only partially ideological. Existing scholarship has examined extremist memes, hybridized extremism, online radicalization, toxic multimodal content, and threat-assessment warning behaviors. This theoretical article develops the Aesthetic-to-Risk Framework of Nihilistic Violence Aesthetics (ART-NVA) as an interpretive vocabulary rather than a risk instrument. It first distinguishes philosophical, vernacular online, and communicative nihilism. It then specifies explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria, defines key terms, and establishes community, platform, and genre context as a scope condition governing all interpretation. Five conceptual dimensions are specified: meaning collapse, anti-human orientation, aesthetic packaging of violence, irony and ambiguity as communicative shields, and proximity to warning-behavior signaling. These are illustrated through recurring aesthetic registers and constructed vignettes that include boundary and negative cases. A three-part typology of ideal types is theorized in explicitly Weberian terms: performative nihilistic transgression, aestheticized anti-human violence, and nihilistic signaling with warning-behavior proximity. A dedicated section considers the framework's application to, and limits with respect to, coercive youth-facing online harm networks. Throughout, the framework rejects individual prediction, ideological profiling, group classification, and the use of surveillance, and specifies when established professional screening should determine whether formal threat assessment is warranted.