She slipped through the smallest hole imaginable, an invisible rip in the fabric of a seemingly ordinary day. Nicola Bulley was there one minute, living a working mother’s familiar, multitasking life – walking the dog while taking a Teams call – and gone the next.
Barely 10 minutes elapsed between Nicola bumping into a friend and someone finding her dog, minus an owner. How can a woman just vanish? We all feel the shock, and perhaps some have questions. But this week has been a masterclass in how not to answer them.
In the vacuum created by a three-week police investigation offering no leads, a ghoulish stream of amateur online sleuths and self-styled citizen investigators descended on the river meadows where Nicola disappeared, livestreaming their half-baked efforts on TikTok to much local distress. After police began dispersing them, YouTuber Dan Duffy uploaded footage of himself apparently being arrested, complaining about “what this country’s turning into. No freedom of speech.” The armchair hounding of her friends and family on social media completes an enraging picture.
Detectives leading high-profile cases invariably face unhelpful distractions: psychics claiming to have seen visions, fantasists “confessing” to crimes they never committed, macabre selfie-taking tourists. Even reporters there to do their jobs can, en masse, overwhelm small communities. But social media vigilantes leading online witch-hunts based on having once watched Happy Valley or downloaded a true crime podcast, or content creators trampling the riverbank, represent an additional pressure new to British police investigations – although there are echoes of what engulfed poor Madeleine McCann’s family. Lancashire police have my sympathies in grappling with this madness. But if what they disclosed this week about a missing woman’s private life was an attempt to defend themselves under intolerable pressure, it was a grievous mistake.
Initially, detectives announced Nicola had “vulnerabilities” identifying her as a high-risk missing person – usually code for thinking someone may conceivably be a danger to themselves – and asked reporters to respect the family’s privacy by not inquiring further. All that achieved was to start a wild guessing game for hordes of self-appointed online truthseekers already bombarding accounts associated with her friends and family with pet theories.
So the police ended up clarifying that Nicola had issues with alcohol, and struggled with the menopause, a detail that seems creepily intrusive, if perhaps a misguided attempt at sympathetic context. Calling this victim-blaming feels wrong when we all hope she hasn’t been a victim of anything, and when nobody should be ashamed of the mental health issues some experience in menopause. But at the very least, it seems unlikely to help find her.
Somehow here three dangerous streams have crossed: a sadly understandable mistrust of police attitudes to women, a conspiracist online culture that assumes everyone is hiding something, and the crass human impulse to make everything about you.
The amateur sleuths’ bragging conceit is that they’re smarter than everyone else; able to spot what everyone supposedly missed on grainy CCTV footage or in interviews given by a partner. But they’re also recognisably the product of so-called “authenticity policing” on social media – a culture of calling out fake content, now colliding grotesquely with real policing.
The more time we spend in easily manipulated online worlds, the more suspicion becomes a life skill. We do need to figure out when something’s filtered or Photoshopped; to understand that “reality” TV is scripted, and influencers’ glossy lives not what they seem; to be sceptical of sob stories from strangers. But that vigilance can tip over too easily into hunting obsessively for minute or imaginary inconsistencies, and into trolling.
A popular 18-year-old TikTokker called Annie Bonelli has been pursued for years by users questioning whether the livid scar on her cheek is real, some breaking down her videos frame-by-frame as “evidence”. The cookery writer and anti-poverty campaigner Jack Monroe’s every word is parsed by Twitter critics convinced she is richer than she lets on. It’s cruel at the best of times, but in the middle of a police investigation it has alarming consequences.
What is to be done? Obviously, the TikTok circus should leave town. Parliament should consider the online harms bill in the light of social media giants once again lagging behind events. Every British police force must learn from Lancashire’s experience. And we’re reminded that mental health in menopause requires better understanding and treatment.
But for a mother of young daughters who vanished in an instant, all most of us can usefully do is hope against hope that she returns – and keep our theories firmly to ourselves.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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