That Andre Guy

If violent video games were a reliable driver of real violence, the solution would be obvious. We’d have to ban huge parts of gaming culture: shooters, war games, crime games, competitive games where killing is the point, and communities where this violence is treated as entertainment. We don’t do that, not because we’re blind to harm, but because society eventually recognized a crucial distinction: a hobby that contains violent content is not the same as a space that actively produces real-world violence. The existence of edgy behaviour or a harmful subculture doesn’t define the entire medium or everyone who participates in it.

The most persuasive version of the “community radicalizes” argument isn’t “everyone who engages becomes violent.” It’s “some isolated, obsessive, vulnerable people spiral in these environments.” That can be true, but it’s also not unique to true crime. It applies to basically every large online space. What often gets misattributed to the subject matter is actually a product of platform dynamics.

Tumblr is relatively algorithm-light, socially porous, and built around identity-based micro-communities. That makes any fixation more visible and more intense: fandoms can intensify parasocial obsession, political spaces can intensify paranoia and radicalization, fitness spaces can intensify eating disorders and self-harm, religious and spiritual spaces can intensify delusions and apocalyptic thinking, gaming spaces can intensify rage and us vs them identity, even mental health spaces can worsen fixation just as easily as they can help through co-rumination, identity entrenchment, or competitive suffering. True crime isn’t an exception here, it’s just another topic that becomes magnified in a structure that encourages deep inward-facing communities. If “a space can worsen vulnerable people” is enough to declare a topic inherently corrupt and worthy of banning entirely, then the logic becomes a general argument against most of the internet, not a specific argument about Tumblr true crime.

This is where people tend to pivot to glorification, and I get that. That can be harmful, and pretending otherwise helps no one. But again, there are games that are genuinely built around cruelty, humiliation, and power fantasies, and there are communities that revel in that. The reasonable response has never been that all games with violence need to be banned. The response is to draw lines around specific content and conduct: explicit encouragement of real harm, targeted harassment, threats, propaganda, or content that exists primarily to celebrate real-world violence. The difference is that true crime involves real victims and real grief, so the ethical line-drawing has to be tighter, but that still points to moderation and norms, not ban the entire subject.

“Tumblr true crime isn’t academic, go to academic forums,” that’s not really an argument for mass reporting everything. If the actual concern is harmful behaviour, then target those behaviours. Make rules against content that endorses violence and enforce against harassment, that’s coherent. What isn’t coherent is treating everything adjacent as degenerate, including infoposts, prevention discussion, media analysis, and fiction that deals with the topic (rip One Day fans)

This is also why the community responsibility argument doesn’t land for me. “I had violent fantasies as a kid, but nobody fostered them. Someone else had similar fantasies and online groups fed it, therefore the community is responsible.” I don’t doubt that communities can intensify fixation for some people. But “a space can worsen someone’s fixation” isn't the same as “the space is morally responsible for whatever they do later,” and it’s not a justification for collective punishment. If we treat it that way, we would end up saying gaming communities are responsible for every violent kid who plays violent games, political communities are responsible for every extremist who commits violence, religious communities are responsible for every act of religious violence, mental health spaces are responsible for every person whose self-harm or suicidal ideation worsens, etc, and we would need to ban those spaces too.