True Crime TikTok Investigations

Source: Dana Galo l True Crime

Many TikTok users use their accounts to recount their experiences and warn others against dangerous situations by describing how they made it out of or how they navigated them. It’s even pretty common at this point that if someone posts a TikTok searching for a missing person or is trying to track someone down, they’re going to be located. There is also a growing community on TikTok that is heavily invested in all things true crime. Most recently, the case of Gabby Petito consumed TikTok; the #GabbyPetito hashtag gained more than 1.8 billion views alone across the app, while #FindGabby and #GabbyPetitoUpdate also amassed millions of views separately. Many users started playing detective and shared updates with anything they could find to piece together the story, including unconfirmed photos and videos, sightings, theories, and stories of people interacting with the couple during their travels. There was such a strong fascination with the case that the videos shared on the app led to actual progress.

Essentially, the story behind the Gabby Petito case is that the 22 year old and her fiance, Brian Laundrie, went on a roadtrip in their van during the summer of 2021 and documented their adventure on Gabby’s Youtube channel and Instagram profile. On September 1st, Brian returned home to Florida alone, and then Gabby’s family reported her missing after not hearing from her for several days. After Brian refused to speak to the authorities and soon disappeared himself, he became a person of interest in her disappearance. All of a sudden, millions of TikTok users became heavily invested in finding the truth of what really happened to Gabby. After it was established that Gabby was missing, TikToks about her and her case entirely consumed TikTok.

One TikTok user posted a video stating that she and her boyfriend picked up Brian as he was hitchhiking on August 29th in Wyoming, after notifying the police about the encounter. Travel vloggers Jenn and Kyle Bethune posted that they came across GoPro footage of Gabby’s white van while they were camping in late August. This information was posted online in response to a post asking people who visited Grand Teton Park to share any information with the FBI. People posted analyses of the videos and Instagram photos posted by Gabby and Bryan during their travels, dissecting clues from their body language, clothing, captions, locations, and every other conceivable aspect. Obviously, with high profile cases like these, there are going to be false reports and misinformation, but those risks were outweighed by the potential of solving a case and creating lots of attention and media coverage. Between the millions of TikTok users engaging with the stories, there were important leads discovered. The ability to get the attention of millions of people and contribute to an investigation is something that we’ve seen before on social media, but never to this extent.