Murder, she vlogged
Meanwhile, the AI tsunami overwhelms an SF magazine, lawyers fret, and search margins narrow
On the morning of January 27, Nicola Bulley was seen across a field walking her dog near her daughters’ school in St Michael’s on Wyre. That was the last time she was seen alive. At 9.20am, her mobile phone pinged a cell tower; its location was linked to the area of a bench near the River Wyre, a fast-flowing tidal river that runs down to the sea some miles away. At 9.35am, Bulley’s dog and phone were found at the bench; the dog was out of its harness and off its lead. Bulley, 45, had disappeared.
The next day, Lancashire police launched a missing persons operation with search dogs, drones and helicopters. There was also an underwater search team. What the police knew, but the public didn’t, was that just over two weeks earlier police and health officials had visited the family home, in Inskip, following reports of “concern for welfare”—presumably hers—as a result of “issues with alcohol”.
Despite increasingly frantic and thorough searches, Bulley did not turn up. Nor did her body. Initially the police said they were keeping an open mind about what had happened but that they believed she had gone missing—that is, gone wherever under her own steam, not as a victim of crime.
By February 3, the police announced that their “main working hypothesis” was that she had fallen into the river. Days later, Peter Faulding, a diving and investigation specialist who has given evidence at a number of inquests into unusual deaths, turned up, searched the river for three days (free of charge to the family), and then declared that “None of this rings right to me. My belief is she’s not in the river at all.”
If this were a crime thriller, that’s the point where you’d get the tingly music. The point where you’d get a jump cut—either to a scene in a dank lockup under some railway arches, or to an innocent-seeming family with the Husband Who Seems A Little On Edge.
The trouble is, a lot of people on social media see something like the Nicola Bulley case and think they are watching a crime thriller. Life can’t be so simple that a woman just dies in a river and her body takes a while to surface, can it?
And so the long wait for Bulley, or her body, to reappear became the food for the social media detectives. Marianna Spring, the BBC’s disinformation reporter, wrote about the strange phenomenon:
Metres from the bench where Nicola's phone was found, I bump into Jack and Stevie. The 20-year-old builders from Darlington have been putting up fencing in the area. But, having finished early for the day, they tell me the social media frenzy has led them down to the river bank.
"It's all through TikTok," Jack tells me. "[I saw] one video about it and thought I want to look deeper and deeper into it. So you get caught in that loop of looking and looking, and it interests you more and more as you go on."
Stevie agrees. He wants to know about "different scenarios and what people think". In his view interest in the case is still picking up steam on social media, rather than waning.
They head off, phones at the ready, to poke around the outside of a derelict out-house along the river bank. Neither post their own videos, and they don't agree with the more extreme conspiracies. Nonetheless, they say they find the social media posts compelling.
You wondered how compelling they, and others like them, found it?
As of Friday 17 February, when I checked TikTok, videos discussing Nicola Bulley's case since she first disappeared and using her name as a hashtag have accumulated more than 270 million views. In comparison, posts and videos using these same phrases on other major social media sites have had less traction.
Over the same period, I discovered that Instagram "reels" using Nicola Bulley's name have had more than 158 million views, and posts have had around 115,000 interactions - likes, follows and comments. On YouTube, videos I found using the same term have racked up 3.3 million views in total, while on Twitter my analysis of mentions and their potential reach estimates just under 21 million views.
On Facebook, where it's not possible to assess views easily, I found around 8,500 publicly-available posts on the term with over two million interactions on posts. Facebook groups dedicated to Nicola Bulley have more than 81,000 members, many sharing speculation about the case.
The police were clearly driven a little mad by the level of social media speculation. All the conspiracy theories were there—she wasn’t really missing, the government had staged something to distract from its political woes, all of that. Social media “influencers” tried to be their own Miss Marples or Jessica Fletcher (or perhaps Lord Peter Wimsey, or Jason King, or Simon Templar..) and search locations near the spot. One filmed himself near a house over the river from where Bulley disappeared; we was arrested and fined £90 for a public order offence after posting video of the scene. Another showed himself digging up woodland nearby.
It’s inevitable. Each of us is the star of social media, and watching enough crime thrillers makes people think that they’re going to be the one who cracks the case; even though we’ve also all seen enough police procedurals to know that they have access to vastly more information than us—they interview the relatives, trace phone records, look at bank accounts, gaze at CCTV.
Social media sleuthing earned a bad reputation ten years ago with the Boston Marathon bombers, where Redditors threw themselves into identifying—wrongly—the person they thought had planted the bombs.
Since then, things have only expanded. And of course the algorithms, amoral and interested only in engagement, will feed the interest of anyone who wants to play amateur detective. There’s now even a messageboard called Websleuths, where you can pick your mystery to try to solve together. And sometimes it really is a force for good, as with the TikToker with 5 million followers, three of whom identified a road rage driver in Los Angeles who had been going around hitting cars and people. The TikToker, acting as a safe intermediary, told the police. As ever with social media, it’s not just one thing.
The trouble, as the police in Lancashire discovered, is that once the social media monster gets going, you have no chance of diverting it. Everything runs downhill.
Perhaps it was a relief of some sort to the family, and even the police, that Nicola Bulley’s body was, finally, found on February 20, a whole 23 days after she went missing. She was identified from her dental records.
The social media focus has moved on, meanwhile. The next day in Australia, a disembodied finger washed up on a beach. “Social media sleuths”, we were told, “have been sent into a frenzy.”
Except.. the finger turned out to be a rubber novelty. Never mind. The hoaxer got the clicks.
A note in passing: last week I wrote about the perplexing use of Content Warnings and “Sensitive” labels on Mastodon. Turns out there are settings you can change so that your sensitivities aren’t troubled. My mistake for not looking harder! Though when something’s the default, 95% of people will stick with it. Thanks to all who pointed this out.
Glimpses of the AI tsunami
(Of the what? Read here.)
• First: after Ben Thompson and Kevin Roose and others felt they’d discovered the ghost in the ChatGPT machine, there was a lot of response from psychologists, professional and otherwise. The best response was “Introducing the AI mirror test, which very smart people keep failing”, by James Vincent at The Verge. In brief, it’s that if you see a person in ChatGPT, it’s because you want to. (Read the article though.)
• Clarkesworld, a science fiction magazine, noted an uptick in ChatGPT-generated stories beginning in January, blogged about it on February 15 as “a concerning trend”, and closed submissions on February 20. The graph of junk submissions is absolutely exponential. That’s the AI tsunami washing in.
• AI “reporters” spread disinformation about Ohio train crash in a coordinated campaign on Twitter. Hear that sound of lapping water?
• Lawyers are starting to use ChatGPT to “research and write legal documents”. Will it really get rid of lawyers? Somehow I have doubts.
• ChatGPT “searches” might be 10 times more expensive than Google’s normal ones. Which would mean that if they form a substantial proportion of Google’s trillions of searches per year, it will cost billions, all of which will come straight off Google’s profit.
• Man beats machine at Go. (By using a weird stratagem that strikes humans as obvious.) Hurrah! Soon we will take back the other important tasks until at least we’re allowed to do long multiplications and divisions ourselves.
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