PST warns on TikTok radicalization, 22 July legacy reaches children, Norway marks 15 years with recruitment still running

• Nettavisen reports that PST sees children as young as 12 being exposed to and pulled toward right-wing extremist content on TikTok.
• AUF leader Gaute Skjervø, a Utøya survivor, says his members still receive Breivik praise and related harassment on social media.
• The problem is no longer confined to fringe forums; recruitment material now reaches minors through mainstream platforms built to reward repetition, provocation and viral clips.
• The Norwegian case fits a wider Nordic question for schools, parents and police: whether prevention systems built for physical milieus are early enough for algorithmic radicalization.

Children as young as 12 are being pulled toward right-wing extremist material on TikTok, according to Norway’s Police Security Service, PST. Fifteen years after the 22 July attacks, Nettavisen reports that the violence still has an active digital afterlife: AUF members are met with Breivik tributes online, and the symbols, jokes and slogans circulate where schoolchildren already spend their time.

That shifts the problem from commemoration to distribution. In 2011, extremist subcultures were easier to picture as closed forums, isolated chat rooms and small physical circles. What PST is describing now is material entering ordinary youth feeds, mixed with entertainment, gaming clips and memes, and reaching minors long before any parent, teacher or local police officer sees a clear ideological commitment. The threshold for contact has fallen. A child does not need to seek out a movement when the movement arrives as short-form video, irony and comment-section bait.

Gaute Skjervø, who survived the Utøya massacre and now leads AUF, told Nettavisen that his members still receive praise for Breivik directed at them on social media. That detail matters because it shows continuity rather than isolated copycat behaviour. The attack remains usable as propaganda, not only as history. A name, a date and a body count still function as social currency in parts of the online youth world, where provocation is cheap and anonymity cheaper.

Schools and parents are left with a task that institutions were not built particularly well to handle. Teachers can spot fights, absences and vandalism; they are less likely to see a progression from edgy clips to racial conspiracy material to open admiration for mass murder, especially when each step is packaged as humour. Parents face the same asymmetry. A phone in a bedroom offers more access to recruiters and agitators than any fringe meeting ever did, while the adults are told to watch for warning signs after the content has already been consumed.

Norway is not alone in that. Across the Nordic countries, police and security services have spent years warning about younger audiences, online subcultures and hybrid extremist content that borrows from gaming culture, meme accounts and transnational grievance politics. The platforms are global; the children are local. That leaves national prevention systems chasing material designed elsewhere, monetised elsewhere and served up one clip at a time to minors in Oslo, Malmö, Aarhus and Helsinki.

The institutional record is mixed. Norway built memorials, commissions and educational work after 22 July, but the current warning from PST suggests that early intervention still begins late, after the content has already found its audience. The anniversary is therefore not only about what happened on Utøya and in central Oslo in 2011. It is also about what happens now on a child’s screen, where a mass murderer’s name still appears often enough to be useful.

Källor: Nettavisen