A teenager goes missing on a holiday abroad. A search party is called; concerned people at home organise, and hope. Family and friends ask for thoughts, prayers, maybe some help getting overseas to join the search. Sometimes the teenager is found alive and well. Sometimes they aren’t.
This is how the story of Jay Slater began. Slater, a 19-year-old from Lancashire, went missing on 17 June after travelling to Tenerife for a music festival with friends and walking back to his accommodation alone, through a mountainous area. His last communication was a call to a member of his group, in which he told them his phone battery was on 1 per cent and that he had cut his leg on a cactus. The national concern in the UK was immediate – Slater became an overnight front-page story.
Within days, though, another version of events began to emerge. A Facebook group dedicated to sharing information related to the search – and encouraging people to go hiking around Tenerife in search of Slater themselves – gained more than 600,000 members, and became cluttered with posts sharing pieces of information scraped from social media. A GoFundMe set up by Slater’s family, raising £50,000, began to draw ire and suspicion online, with people demanding to know what the money was for or who it would be going to. Inconsistent statements from Slater’s friends became the subject of further conspiratorial speculation.
Almost overnight, the response to Slater’s tragic disappearance shifted from international concern to conspiratorial thinking and glib jokes. On TikTok, more than 30 million videos were posted under the subject “Jay Slater Opinions”, with nearly as many for “Things That Dont Make Sense Jay Slater”. Some videos that speculated whether Slater was actually alive and well gained millions of views each. While some suggested foul play may have been involved, even more made light of the situation. Memes proliferated alleging Slater and his friends had scammed the public for cash. These theories were exacerbated by the search being called off on 30 June, and on 2 July, when the police said there was no indication that Slater had even been the victim of a crime. Slater’s mother made a statement saying the conspiracy theories were hindering the investigation and begged people to stop. She added that many of the “vile” posts about her son had been sent directly to his friends and family.
The conspiracy theory that Slater’s disappearance was a hoax – cooked up by a group of people looking to profit off a naive public – had become widespread. That attitude enabled people to see Slater and his family as acceptable fodder for mockery. But on Monday 15 July, Spanish authorities in Tenerife said rescue workers had found a “lifeless body” that appeared to be Slater’s. LBT Global, a British overseas missing persons charity that was working with Slater’s family, said that the body was found with Slater’s possessions and clothing and that the spot where the remains were found was close to the site of his phone’s last location.
This story is another example of an increasingly familiar narrative around missing person cases when a body is not immediately found. A true-crime-driven social media frenzy causes mass speculation, which presumes a multitude of grim causes and outcomes. Online spectators crassly debate and dissect the case, turning it into clickable, shareable, monetisable content. And then a body is discovered, and attention swiftly moves on.
We saw this in 2021, when the American 22-year-old Gabby Petito went missing on a road trip, becoming the subject of viral online sleuthing before police found that she had been killed by her boyfriend. It happened again in January 2023, when Nicola Bulley went missing near her home in Lancashire: millions of videos about the case emerged online, as digital detectives and influencers speculated about her “murder” and suggested potential suspects. Some even turned up to her hometown for an investigative weekend break, before the police eventually uncovered that she had drowned in a local river, finding “no evidence of either suspicious activity or third party involvement”.
The response to Jay Slater’s disappearance feels particularly striking, marked by a complete lack of concern for his wellbeing. Thousands of people online responded to the disappearance of a teenager with cruelly insensitive mockery and a stunning lack of empathy.
This is the logical conclusion of our true-crime-poisoned culture, in which the sad circumstances of real people’s lives are treated as titillatingly suspicious. In this context, the flourishing of gratuitous, pseudo-concerned sleuthing content is the best-case scenario. In the worst case, their disappearance – even their death – becomes a joke. Despite the fact that a body has now been found, the jokes have continued, with posts on Twitter and TikTok still going viral.
Some might say we are approaching a cultural tipping point: if our true-crime culture is not contained now, we will be forever desensitised to stories of personal tragedy – the harms of which extend well beyond the cruelty to victims’ friends and family. But the treatment of Jay Slater suggests it is already too late. We have tipped into a new norm, a new era, in which the lives of real people are merely fodder for true-crime content.
[See also: The lure of political killing]
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