It’s a given that when a bad news story surfaces in the media, a stream of crass commentary soon follows. From bad jokes and deliberate trolling to those who find a tenuous way of centring themselves in the media storm, people will post anything – anything – about a trending story, reducing a terrible situation to just another excuse for attention.
This ethos drives online responses to any sensitive story, including – and especially – high-profile murders and criminal investigations: so much fresh fodder for the online “true crime community”. Over the last few years, we have seen the rise of social media sleuthing and content creation around missing person cases, such as the disappearances of Gabby Petito and Nicola Bulley, both of which turned into a global social media frenzy generating thousands of tweets and billions of views on TikTok. The latter case even led to an influx of “true crime tourism” in Bulley’s hometown of St Michael’s on Wyre, Lancashire, with people searching for her body and visiting sites connected to her disappearance while the investigation was going on. To many, these displays of cynicism and emotional detachment from such serious events are galling. To others, these stories are simply another form of entertainment.
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