The Boy Who Played God: How a Portuguese Teen Led a Digital Cult of Death Across Continents
He never pulled a trigger — but he designed the blueprint.
It started like so many teenage obsessions do — online, anonymous, and undetected. But this one didn’t orbit K-pop fandoms or Minecraft servers. It moved in darker spaces. A 17-year-old Portuguese boy, known online as Mikazz, wasn’t just gaming or joking with friends. He was building something far more dangerous: a network of rage, aestheticized death, and ideological extremism. He called it The Kiss.
From behind his keyboard in Portugal, he curated a world that fused school shootings, Nazi symbols, and sadistic memes into a kind of sick religion. His followers — many of them young boys in Brazil — called him their “god.” And they listened. When one of them brought a knife to a school in São Paulo in October 2023 and murdered a fellow student, investigators traced the act back to The Kiss’s Discord server.
This was no longer digital play. It was real.
The Digital Kill Chain
The platforms were ordinary: Discord, TikTok, Telegram. But they became the arteries of a decentralized cult. Within these channels, Mikazz and his followers shared tutorials on how to maim, abuse, humiliate. They traded child pornography. They exalted Hitler. They posted videos of animal torture like trophies. It was a gamified nihilism — masked as irony, but with consequences that bled into classrooms and morgues.
The Portuguese Public Prosecutor’s Office has charged him with incitement to homicide, association with criminal activity, and 224 counts of child pornography distribution. But the real horror is that his story isn’t unique — only his reach.
We used to fear that the internet was making kids numb. Now we must ask if it’s making them weaponized.
From Basement Rooms to Brazilian Classrooms
Why Brazil? Why were so many of his followers from there?
Because Brazil, like the U.S., is in the grip of a growing wave of school violence — dozens of attacks in the past few years, often perpetrated by teens radicalized online. Because poverty, racism, and Bolsonaro-era weaponization of youth trauma made many feel invisible — until someone online offered them a twisted version of meaning.
In a world that increasingly refuses boys emotional complexity, grief, or softness, they turn instead to armor. And sometimes that armor is lined with swastikas.
What Happens When a Teen Becomes a Symbol of Hate?
It’s easy to demonize Mikazz — and make no mistake, his actions are inexcusable. But it’s also necessary to ask what made this possible. How does a 17-year-old come to see himself not as a citizen, a student, or a son — but as a god of destruction?
Who failed him? His school? His family? A society where fascist aesthetics are once again “edgy” content?
We can arrest individuals, but we can’t arrest the culture that creates them. And in that sense, The Kiss is not over. It will reincarnate under other usernames, on other servers. Unless we learn to spot the warning signs — and unless we radically rethink how boys are raised in an algorithmic age.
Where We Go From Here
The Portuguese government acted. Brazilian authorities, too. But law enforcement alone is a rearview solution. What we need is digital education, emotional literacy, and a new language for male identity — one that doesn't equate strength with cruelty.
Because this wasn’t just a crime. It was a collapse. Of empathy. Of connection. Of the protective walls that are supposed to keep children from becoming monsters.
And the scariest part? It didn’t take much to build. Just a Wi-Fi connection. A username. And no one watching.
