Through their quickly consumable content, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter have made it increasingly easy to connect with people who have similar interests to you. While this helps people to find those like them, it may become dangerous when those interests are morbid. All over social media, you can find fan accounts and fan edits for the world’s most deadly serial killers. By connecting true-crime fans all over the world, social media has caused an emergence of teens who have a cult-like obsession with killers like Dahmer, Bundy, and Manson. Today’s article covers social media’s obsession with serial killers and how you can keep your child safe from digital injury with our GKISScreen Safety Toolkit.
Fandoms and The Rise of the “Stan”
A fandom is a group built around the shared interest or enjoyment of something in popular culture.[1] Since before the creation of the internet, people have gathered to meet and obsess over their common interests. The internet has simply made it easier to do so.
Fandoms provide a space for people to be themselves without judgment, leading to higher levels of self-esteem.[2] There is a term for those who are particularly obsessed, called “Stans.” A Stan is someone who is a mix between a stalker and a fan, someone who shows extreme fandom behavior to the point of excessiveness.[3]
Typically online, you can expect to see fandoms for pop culture groups like movies, TV shows, and musicians. However, with the rise in true crime popularity, a new subgroup has formed of “Stans” with a particular interest in serial killers and their victims. These Stans continually post videos of serial killer interviews edited to music, create fan accounts, and even write serial killer self-insert fanfiction where they are the victims.[4]
Social Media’s Role in Obsession
Social media thrives on content that can get lots of views and produce lots of likes, meaning that the more scandalous and salacious content is, the more likely it is to do well. The notifications from social media likes and comments trigger the reward center of our brain, releasing dopamine and making us feel good all over.[5] When users post content that is related to their fandoms, they get a rush of dopamine and that connection between fandom content and happiness causes them to post more and interact with the content more.
Social media has also created a world where content is readily available for consumption, meaning that people can see posts specifically tailored to their interests 24/7. This allows people to go from fans to superfans, spending their waking moments scouring the internet for posts related to their fandom. One Quora user shared their experience as an obsessive fan, “I’ve been addicted to a fandom for 7 years, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it for that long. As per my personal experience, I got sucked into several fandoms due to over-engaging in social media. I over-identified with the idols and associated my own ego with that of their public image.”[6] This idolization of celebrities creates dangerous parasocial relationships that are only made further dangerous when one’s idol is a serial killer. To learn more about parasocial relationships, check out the GKIS article, “The Dangers of Online Parasocial Celebrity Relationships”.
When Does Harmless Become Harmful
It’s easy to brush off fandom behavior as nothing more than a phase one will grow out of. But when the obsession turns into something more it can become dangerous. Cody Ackland was a 24-year-old who grew up obsessed with Ted Bundy, an interest that no one paid much attention to until he attacked and murdered 18-year-old Bobbi Anne McLeod. Just hours before attacking McLeod, Ackland had searched for “Ted Bundy dead victim’s bodies” and “Ukrainian serial killer bodies” on the internet.[7]
Teens have become more and more desensitized to serial killers and true crime content, going so far as to make fan accounts as part of a big internet joke. When 23-year-old Peter Manfredonia was on the run from the police following a double murder he committed, teens on TikTok and Instagram began making fan accounts and posting meme comments to the killer’s personal Instagram page.[8] While the people running these accounts chalk up their actions to being a big joke, there is a large community of people who genuinely run fan accounts for notable serial killers.
Reddit user IkariMonster shared screenshots of several accounts from Twitter to a sub-Reddit, stating, “These teenagers worship and treat serial killers and school shooters like e-boys.”[9] In the screenshots, you can see several fan accounts treating serial killers Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and the Columbine Shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold as though they were celebrities. In one post a teenage girl shares a selfie next to her bedroom wall, which is covered in photos of Dahmer with the caption, “I just thought I’d share cause I think my wall looks pretty [face with hearts emoji].” These accounts and posts are just one example of content and cult-like obsessive behavior that exists across multiple social media platforms.
The victims of these killers were people with friends and family and the pain they endured it absolutely horrendous. There is no reason that serial killers and mass murderers should be praised or celebrated for their actions. The creation of fan accounts and fandom content perpetrates further violence against the families of the victims and serves as a constant reminder of the pain they suffered. GKIS does not endorse this behavior. We are mortified by it and think it is destructive to kids and teens to be so callous and to celebrate violence in this way.
What Parents Can Do
Installing management tools for social media can help you in monitoring their internet behavior. If you would like help with this process, check out our GKISScreen Safety Toolkit made to help empower and provide parents with smart tech tools to filter, monitor, and manage online behavior.
Co-view the content your child interacts with; you can scroll together to choose what content they view and enjoy.
Make it known from the beginning the type of content that is acceptable for your child to view. We can help facilitate this healthy conversation with ourConnected Families Screen Agreement to help you work with your child to create a collaborative, living document.
Kids are the number one target for identity theft due to the chances that the crime won’t be detected until the child reaches adulthood and seeks their first loan. This cybercrime involves the theft and fraudulent use of a child’s personal information (like name, social security number, address, and date of birth) to open lines of credit, take out loans, or access financial accounts. This scary issue is the drive behind developing our Cybersecurity and Red Flags Supplement, a comprehensive tool to detect online scams before the worst can happen. Find out more about cybercrime and what you can do to prevent it with this GKIS article.
Identity Theft
Identity theft can be used for many types of crimes, including:
taking out a loan
buying lines of credit
accessing the victim’s financial accounts
securing a driver’s license or employment or
seeking medical care.
Personal information can be stolen from virtual sources, like screen devices, websites, and email accounts, or in real life (IRL) from skimming information from your ATM card with a special device or stealing it from your home, wallet, trash, or mail.
Who is vulnerable?
Unsuspecting victims can be tricked into revealing private information by phishing scammers. These cybercriminals impersonate legitimate companies asking for passwords and credit information necessary to process a fake change of address form, application for credit, or to avoid an IRS tax lien or fake criminal charges.
Vulnerable populations include young people, the elderly, and immigrants or workers here on a visa.
Why is it important to check for identity theft?
Once discovered, it may take several costly months or even years to get credit and criminal records cleaned up and sorted out. Your child’s financial options may be blocked or delayed when deadlines, like college and employment, are most critical.
Can you imagine dealing with that in your overtasked, underfunded life? There are companies that offer cyber protective services and others that help you clean up the catastrophic results of cybercrime.
The Child Identity Theft Bill
In 2015, I received a phone call from Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin’s office asking for a statement about a Child Identity Theft bill (AB1553) that she is sponsoring. Asm. Irwin served as Chair of the Assembly Select Committee on Cybersecurity in Sacramento.
This bill served to “amend the Civil Code to require credit agencies to allow parents or guardians to create a new credit report for a minor child for the purpose of placing a security freeze on the child’s credit. Without a credit report to freeze, protection is difficult.” She was asking for my statement and support and wondering if I knew any child victims of identity theft.
After sending out an inquiry on my GetKidsInternetSafe Facebook page, it didn’t take long before I’d uncovered three victims who were willing to share their stories. Two involved child identity theft for financial cybercrime and the other involved identity theft on social media for cyberbullying. I’m sharing the financial theft stories to demonstrate how easy it is to become a victim and suggest steps you can take to protect your kids starting today.
Megan’s Story
My first respondent was a dad whose stepdaughter had recently graduated from nursing school. When the family went to their credit union in preparation for purchasing a car, they discovered that the stepdaughter’s credit report was pages and pages long with a sub-par (mid 5’s) credit rating.
It turned out that a criminal out of Phoenix had fraudulently opened several lines of credit with her social security number. From Sprint to multiple department stores, the crook had charged a debt of over $60,000. The family filed a police report to start the long process of calling creditors and clearing her name.
Although they had the criminal’s address, they elected not to press formal charges. When I spoke to the stepfather, he did not know whether the criminal was ever charged. He also said they never discovered how or when the fraud started, but it seemed to be a single party that may have gotten her personal information when she applied for a loan for nursing school.
The fraud seemed to stop once the credit agencies were notified, and an alert was placed on her account. Ultimately, it took the family over twenty hours of filing time plus another fifteen hours from a private credit fraud service to get her credit repaired. A year after the discovery, they had finally gotten her credit score back to the 700s with letters from the creditors with apologies. Nightmare!
Jose’s Story
The second identity fraud victim shared a truly tragic tale that has spanned over thirty years. Jose, who is 40 years old now, was 13 years old when he was first contacted by the IRS and told that he owed over $10,000 in back taxes. Despite all efforts to get clear of fraud, he still has issues like denied credit (including a first-time home buyer loan because it looked like he already owned properties) to two court-ordered paternity tests for mistaken-identity child support cases.
Jose also shared a story about being pulled over on an arrest warrant while he was on his way to becoming a priest. The officer said if it turned out he was lying about the fraud, he would arrest him and make him apologize directly to his lieutenant. He responded to the police officer that if HE was correct, the officer would have to go to church and apologize directly to his bishop. He laughed when he said the officer lived up to his promise.
Despite his resilient attitude, Jose has had to change phone numbers and bank accounts, can’t pay anything with checks, and has elected to put all property in his wife’s name. Considering the decades of victimization, he has had to endure, he goes to great lengths to protect his children’s personal information.
What can a parent do to avoid child identity theft?
Protect personal information at home with tools such as a locking mailbox, an in-home safe for storage, and a shredder for the disposal of personal documents.
Install cybersecurity safeguards on-screen media like passcodes and screensavers, firewalls, antivirus and encryption software, and secure passwords.
Educate your children about maintaining privacy and using discretion online. That means cautioning them about disclosing their name, address, school, date of birth, or any other personally identifying information in images (t-shirts with their school logo) or texting or posting. Geotagging on photos and social media should be turned off to hide location.
Setup up filtering and monitoring software and parent protection options like those from our Screen Safety Toolkit to block inappropriate contacts on the Internet and monitor your children’s activities, particularly in chat rooms, social media, texting, and instant messaging.
Teach your children about cybersecurity issues and skills to protect against hacking, phishing, and malware. Good habits include consistently downloading updates for security patches, using strong passwords and changing them often, and not clicking on embedded links or opening attachments from unknown sources.
If you are traveling…
Don’t post pictures that can reveal travel data, like boarding passes, passports, or travel or hotel vouchers. Not only can criminals benefit from knowing the details of your trip, but they may also read personal information from barcodes to steal your identity. The best option, wait until you’re home to post travel photos.
Avoid public WiFi. Hackers can access your private information using a man-in-the-middle attack (MITM). This means the criminal intercepts the link between your device and the server. This breach is like eavesdropping and can result in your private information being accessed and even altered. Malware can even be delivered to your device. A MITM attacker may set up a fake access point named similarly to the public network connection (called an “evil twin”) or engage in “packet sniffing” or “sidejacking,” which means using a tool to capture network traffic at the Ethernet frame level. Simple shoulder surfing at coffee shops or on airplanes can also result in privacy breaches. If you have to use public WiFi, practice situational awareness, and verify the WiFi name with staff at the public site. Avoid online tasks that involve private information like online banking or using private transaction information like date of birth, credit card numbers, tax IDs, or social security numbers. Always log out when using a hotspot to avoid the hacker continuing the session. Consider setting up a secure virtual private network (VPN) to encrypt inbound and outbound data. However, VPNs can decrease your bandwidth. Public WiFi may not be encrypted, but most major websites that use a password, like Amazon and PayPal, have encryption. If the URL has an “S” (for “secure”) at the end, as in HTTPS, then there’s some level of encryption.
Avoid using public computers for the same reasons it’s risky to use public WiFi. The software could be silently running in the background, thus capturing data from your online activities.
If your child is traveling with you, turn off location settings so criminals can’t intercept your location data and use it for targeted attacks. On Snapchat, this is called going “ghost mode.” Of course, if your child is on an independent walkabout, you may want to leave location services on so you can track them for safety.
Freeze your child’s credit.
Contact one of the three major credit card companies to see what kind of protection options they offer, like a credit freeze, which has been demonstrated to be one of the most effective strategies for preventing child identity theft. Each state has laws on how a credit freeze can be done. Remember, once a freeze has been implemented you must order a “thaw” on the account before applying for credit.
Equifax: This website explains what is needed to mail in the request. According to the person I spoke to there is no fee for minors.
Experian: This link explains what is needed to mail in the request. After 3 tries I gave up trying to upload the docs online. I couldn’t reach anybody, so I sent in a check for $10 plus 7.25% tax (Ventura County).
Transunion: I had better luck with Transunion when I called the number 888-909-8872. A polite and helpful representative informed me that neither of my minor children had credit files (a good start). He then offered the procedure necessary to get a free security freeze on my child’s account by mailing a letter with the following information:
Send in 2 pages: 1st page: Cover letter listing the minor info: full name, address, last four of social and file # (rep will give you) plus reason for security freeze (“Proactively protecting my child against fraud) plus requester info (parent): Full name, address, relationship. 2nd page: Official request in letter style format mentioning enclosure copy of minor’s social security card and birth certificate.
GetKidsInternetSafe was created to inform parents about proven preventative strategies before tragedy strikes. To get a head start today, check out my GKIS Connected Family Online Course.
The C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health found that parents rank INTERNET SAFETY as number 4 (up from 8th in 2014) for biggest child health concern and SEXTING as number 6 (up from 13th). You know why parents are getting so concerned? Because they need to be!
Let’s be honest here. Kids want Internet access like a crack addict wants a hit. And so do we! Screen media is our favorite past time. Those elegant screens clutched in our greedy hands feed us delicious content that we gobble up too many minutes of our day. Kids love it too. And parents are conflicted about what to do about that.
If we disallow it, our kids are dependent on us for entertainment. Keeping them happy and busy without screens is exhausting! Our parents chased us outside to run with the neighborhood kids. When we reminisce about being latch key kids, we tell stories of the eight shades of happy peril we were regularly in. We don’t want our kids in any shade of peril. We want them tucked in the safety of our homes. As a result, we have agreed to be in their constant servitude. Poor us. Poor them.
We do the best we can to keep them busy. Then we worry they’re too busy! What do we rely on when we’ve run out of ideas? Screen media! My daughter’s first love, besides her parents and her poodle Buster, was her purple stuffed Barney. I guiltily admit she was so sold on that annoying talking dinosaur she was a successfully branded consumer by toddlerhood. Every morning while I made breakfast she sat in front of the TV in her expertly branded Disney princess feety jammies and Mickey Mouse toddler chair. I allowed Disney to have that kind of influence on my kid, because I didn’t consider it that harmful and television gave me a moment’s peace. Parents today have even a bigger dilemma with so many screen devices.
Consumer branding is the least of our worries these days. The Internet offers amazing vistas for education, but parents have a tough time managing it effectively. In response to the sad outcomes to poor screen management I was seeing in private practice, I created parenting programs like the GetKidsInternetSafe Screen Safety Toolkit to help families avoid online dangers. I’m aware that parents want to dismiss the GetKidsInternetSafe (GKIS) message as sanctimonious hysteria. If I could forget what I know, believe me I would too. You know what we moms want to read? We want snarky articles about the pleasures of red wine and celebrity bashing and to avoid scary information that makes us feel guilty and scare the crap out of us.
So, admittedly, here I am delivering today’s informational kale salad with a bit of fun snark. And the good news? I’m not going to leave it at the scary stuff. Here are some parenting maneuvers you can do today to prevent tragedy and build your child’s resilience, hopefully avoiding a trip to the psychologist’s office down the line.
If your child is allowed Internet access, ongoing dialogue for education and skill-building is a must.
I know this kind of sucks for us. It takes time to research what to talk about so we don’t blow our credibility stringing together sensational media headlines like our parents did about pot. We also risk annihilating their sense of safety telling them about online predators and risk.
But it doesn’t have to be an awkward or terrifying one-time lecture. Skill building is important for little kids to teens. It just takes targeted conversation and lots of listening. With an eye on the news and an occasional follow of a free online safety blog like GetKidsInternetSafe, you have the information you need to introduce topics into family conversation that are cooperative and positive rather than threatening and exaggerated. The best part is that every conversation builds that important parent-child connection.
How can you get a conversation started? It can go something like this, “Did you hear about the dad that cyberbullied the cyberbully yesterday? He got fed up with a kid harassing his daughter on Snapchat so he posted a video talking about the kid’s dad. Do you think he did the right thing?” You can even show the video. By avoiding shaming lectures and staying curious and positive, it will become evident that you are their go-to person and have their backs online as well as offline.
What topics should you cover? The same kind of social skills you talk to them about in their offline world. How about start with digital citizenship. Introduce how to respond to cyberbullying and, if they’re older, the risks of sextortion. Dialogue provides opportunity for education and skill building. It’s not enough to just introduce the issues, tell your kids details, like how to recognize the manipulative techniques online predators use to groom their victims. With this information your kids will be that much more resilient should a predator get through your controls.
Even easy cybersecurity strategies, like a post-it note over your computer’s camera lense, may cripple a Remote Access Trojan’s (RAT) ability to take over your computer’s camera. Beyond educating and skill building, there’s another thing parents need to do to get their kids Internet safe.
2. Install filtering and monitoring apps and software.
One day of installation can prevent months of online risk. If your kids are little, that means installing filtering tools like child-safe browsers and setting parental controls. If your kids are older, manage their use of social media apps and add monitoring software. Let them know you’re supervising their screen use, because lying and sneaking may harm the very connection that your dialogue has nurtured.
Although kids will initially complain about monitoring strategies, it’s not a mystery to anybody why parents need to parent online as well as offline. You may not be the über mom servant of their dreams, but we are all just doing the best we can, aren’t we?
I’d love to hear how your screen media strategies are faring on the GetKidsInternetSafe Facebook page. If you’d like more suggestions on staging your home for screen safety success, check out the GKIS Connected Family Online Course.
I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetYourKidsInternetSafe.
Onward to More Awesome Parenting,
Tracy S. Bennett, Ph.D.
Mom, Clinical Psychologist, CSUCI Adjunct Faculty
I’ve had a successful private psychology practice for almost twenty years. Half of my clients are adults and half children and teens. It is not uncommon on the first visit to encounter a motivated parent and a resistant teen. And by “resistant” I mean sullen, unfriendly, and sometimes outright hostile.
My first goal is to ensure that both parents and teens open up and engage with the therapeutic process. Imagine how difficult this is. Each party in the room has different and often opposing agendas. But essentially each wants me to tell the other how wrong they are while assuring them they are right. It’s impossible really.
The teens assume that they are at a serious disadvantage. After all, I’m old and a mother myself. How can I possibly relate to the plight of teens? And consider that they have already accrued some painful experiences with adults in the community who often treat teens unfairly with self-righteous contempt about the “entitlement of kids these days.”
Please join me in a virtual representation of a typical psychotherapy session in my office. Of course this representation is not of an actual client due to confidentiality concerns. Janie is fictional. She is a mosaic of many clients I have seen over the years.
Janie is a 14 year-old girl who was referred for treatment by her pediatrician after her parents checked her texts and discovered that she had a new best friend. The friend is a same-aged girl who lives in another state. The friendship consists of hundreds of texts, images, and videos shared every day for the last two months. Sally, the new bestie, seems like a nice enough girl, except she struggles with some painful psychological issues including anorexia, depression, anxiety, and cutting.
Janie is a compassionate caretaker for Sally and has shared her own secrets over the two-month-long friendship. Janie’s secrets include how angry she is with her stupid parents, how she got drunk last Friday night, how much she wants to lose her virginity . . . and . . . and . . . and . . .
Janie’s parents are devastated. They’d noticed she had become sullen, lost weight, and was being uncharacteristically cruel to them and her little brother over the last month. As a result, they decided to check her texts for the first time, elaborating that they had never had reason to be concerned before. In desperation, they yanked all screen media from Janie immediately and demanded that Janie never speak to Sally again.
Now, they sit across from me pleading with me to tell them what to do.
Parent demand for directive advice often puts me in a rough spot. Unlike popular public perception (thanks Dr. Phil), good psychotherapy is less about advice and more about facilitation and empowerment. Furthermore, when a family presents with an issue like this, there are five potential clients in the room: the daughter, the mother, the father, the marriage, and the family. Everybody needs something from the session, and desperately.
Not only do they all need reassurance and understanding, but they also need strategies, tried and true research-based strategies that are sensible and immediately actionable. They also need hope and healing from shame and guilt.
Prior to creating GetKidsInternetSafe(GKIS), I sometimes found myself blinking at distraught families asking for screen media advice like a well-intentioned, but dense jersey cow. I mean I was fully loaded to help with the relationships, but screen media rules? Yikes!
Ultimately, epidemic screen media issues in my practice and the need for support with my own kids propelled me to launch GetKidsInternetSafe. I worked for a year and a half to develop a state-of-the-art screen media toolkit; a toolkit that my families sorely needed, just like yours might, if not today then definitely tomorrow.
You might still be dying to know, what is the one thing that will destroy your parent-child relationship? One of the most common mistakes parents are making today with their kids is allowing screen media without putting a screen media living agreement in place.
What is a screen media living agreement? It is a written contract that comprehensively addresses any issues that may arise as the result of screen media, including family values, netiquette, rules, and regulations. And it’s a living agreement, because it is designed to be renegotiated and altered over time as issues come up and kids get older.
But how is this possible to develop a contract early enough, since even infants are allowed screen media? Educating yourself BEFORE your children use their first screen is essential. Recognize the risks and benefits of screen media and lay out a plan that allows enrichment but minimizes danger. GetKidsInternetSafe provides lots of free material to get you started, but parents must initiate the process.
What if you blew it and your kids have already been using screen media for awhile, like Janie’s family? Here’s the quick version of the plan I offered for Janie’s family.
In order to untangle screen media risk, a family like Janie’s must cleanse the screen media environment and start over. Lucky for me, most families already come in having already stripped screen media from their teens because if they haven’t, then it’s my job to suggest it. I have to justify it to the teens and quick, or I’ll lose their “like” forever.
From there, I lead the family through a psychoeducation process about how to:
reconnect as a family,
setup appropriate tech for cybersecurity, filtering, and monitoring,
make a workable and comprehensive GKIS Living Agreement,
implement sound parenting strategies for maintenance, and
slowly re-introduce screen media privileges while isolating and containing risk factors, monitoring and filtering as appropriate for the child’s age and the family’s beliefs.
You’d think the teens would despise me for suggesting this lockdown of their screen media, right? To the contrary, I am frequently shocked and impressed with the teenagers’ abilities to accept reasonable limits and embrace a more honest, up-front screen media plan. No more fearing parental spying and ambush, no more guessing at rules, and no more disappointing the people they love the most. Teens typically love the cooperative negotiation process and the opportunity to use their screen media without constant threats and withdrawal of privileges. I am not exaggerating when I say it delights me to see families transform from utter estrangement and desperation to cooperation, kindness, and compassion.
Just as parents must recognize that teens need their privacy, teens must recognize that screen media is not the appropriate medium for private content. There are countless interception and reproduction points in screen media communication. The illusion of screen media privacy is a trap.
Teens have to learn (hopefully the easy way) that it’s a trap, because one is lured into thinking that the conversations they are having will stay private. It’s a trap because it’s so easy to carry your friend with you 24/7, constantly sharing every activity, feeling, and venti frappuccino. It’s a trap because constant contact leads to dependent, intimate friendships. It’s a trap because, once shared, you lose control over that content, not only in regard to who sees it but also how it may be shared. A text, post, or image now becomes a physical entity that represents who you are – the good, the bad, and the ugly; an entity that can be edited and reshared with unknown numbers of people without consent.
If you’re a parent or know one, please avoid family crisis by taking an hour and sketching out a screen media living agreement for your family. GetKidsInternetSafe is here to help. And heads up, I’ve seen these screen media traps snare even young children and their parents. Don’t wait.
I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetKidsInternetSafe.
Thanks to CSUCI intern, Katherine Carroll for researching social media and serial killer obsession. 
