(CN) — In November 2022, the murders of four University of Idaho students in their home shocked the small town of Moscow, Idaho, and drew oglers from across the country.
Social-media star Ashley Guillard was sure she’d cracked the case.
A TikTok influencer and self-described psychic, Guillard told her more than 100,000 followers that the killer was “possibly an ex” of one of the victims and accused Rebecca Scofield, a local history professor, of having “ordered the execution.” Scofield sued the TikTok star for defamation in December, saying the online sleuth never produced a shred of evidence to back up her wild claims.
Guillard is hardly the first person to make irresponsible claims about serious crimes on the internet. Ten years ago, when social media was still relatively new, anonymous Reddit users wrongfully accused Brown University student Sunil Tripathi of being involved in the Boston Marathon bombings.
They reasoned that Tripathi sort of looked like the bombers (he had tan complexion) and noted that he had gone missing shortly before the attacks. In fact, Tripathi was missing because he had committed suicide. His body was later found in a river in Rhode Island.
If the internet was already prone to rumor-mongering and disinformation, recent trends have made it worse. Social media has become a veritable industry, with one in four young people now saying they want to be influencers. Meanwhile, a boom in true crime has seen fame-hungry amateurs reach for their detective caps.
Regardless of what merit these armchair detectives have or lack, one thing is for certain: It’s their audience that grants them influence. With little guardrails on online speech, individual consumers must choose where to draw the line between good-faith engagement and self-serving speculation. They don’t always choose it right.
It’s a genre that has penetrated podcast charts, the New York Times bestseller list and every mainstream streaming service. Author James Renner, known for his true crime journalism and books like “True Crime Addict,” says citizen sleuths are by no means a new fixture in society.
What is new, though, is social media.
“There have always been so-called citizen sleuths, but the recent popularity of social media outlets like TikTok, Reddit, and Twitter (now X) have overinflated their power,” Renner told Courthouse News in an email. “Armchair detectives can research alleged suspects with simple Google searches and post photos and home addresses on these apps with little accountability.”
Section 230, a longstanding standard of the federal Communications Decency Act, prevents social media companies from being held liable for damaging speech, even if that speech drives up engagement and those companies’ stock prices.
“I'm a proponent of the First Amendment,” Renner added — “but there needs to be regulation for this sort of behavior online.” He thinks social media companies should respond faster to reports of bad behavior and said “one easy fix” would be to verify the identities of users. “People who post these things anonymously are the most dangerous of the bunch.”
In recent years, there’s been no shortage of lurid true-crime stories to capture the public imagination. With social media now omnipresent, victims often leave an online presence too, allowing the public a voyeuristic peek into their once-private lives.
Millions of online sleuths followed the saga of Gabby Petito, who disappeared in 2021 while chronicling a cross-country road trip with her fiancé Brian Laundrie. Laundrie, who police accused of killing Petito, later committed suicide.
There’s Alex Murdaugh, the scion of a South Carolina legal family who was convicted in March of killing his son and wife. There’s Rex Heuermann, a New York architect who was charged in July with murdering at least three women in Long Island. Social media offers an endless stream of such content, with true-crime YouTube channels pumping out titles like “Son of NFL player executes sleeping parents” and “Woman dismembered w/ chainsaw and stuffed in suitcases.”
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