Gabby Petito: The Impacts of Social Media Sleuthing

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Alyssa Hurst:

You're listening to RadioEd.

Lorne Fultonberg:

A University of Denver podcast.

Nicole Militello:

We're your hosts, Nicole Militello.

Lorne Fultonberg:

Lorne Fultonberg.

Alyssa Hurst:

And I'm Alyssa Hurst.

Alyssa Hurst:

For the past several weeks, people in every corner of the country have been carefully following the case of 22-year-old Gabby Petito, who was murdered while traveling the country by van with her boyfriend, Brian Laundrie. Ever since Petito's parents first reported her missing the case has run wild on social media, where amateur detectives have picked apart every last detail of the young woman's final days, and even have contributed legitimate leads to the investigation.

Alyssa Hurst:

But all that social media attention isn't necessarily a good thing, and it raises a number of questions: whose lives are deemed important enough for the masses to care about? How does intense media scrutiny impact a case and the family behind it? And what are the larger implications of social media sleuthing?

Alyssa Hurst:

Jeff Lin, Associate Professor of Criminology in the University of Denver's College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, joined us to dive in.

Alyssa Hurst:

So over the last couple of weeks, the country has been watching this story of Gabby Petito and her murder unfold, especially via social media platforms like TikTok. Is this move away from mainstream media something that you think is new, or happening more?

Jeffrey Lin:

I guess I don't know what new is anymore. So is new this year? Then no. Is new in the last 10 years? Then yes. So yeah, in the scale of history, it's extremely new, and in the scale of communications and media, it's extremely new. To the point where we don't fully understand the dynamics of social media and crime and public opinion, because not enough time has passed to really fully get it.

Jeffrey Lin:

And it evolved so quickly. Two years ago, if you said TikTok to me, I would think of a clockmaker, or something like that, and now I know what it is. I don't use it. But in two years from now, three years from now, there's going to be some other platform or app, and we'll look at TikTok like MySpace.

Alyssa Hurst:

I'm curious how you've noticed the dynamic shift as somebody who watches how this is covered in the media. How is the media responding to this new pressure of social media?

Jeffrey Lin:

Oh, that's a really good question. So I think this gets us take the Gabby Petito case a bit. So in media studies, in criminology, for a long time, we've focused on ideal typical crime, we might call them. Crimes that reach high levels of public and media attention. I think the roles in these stories are static over time, and they have been for centuries, honestly. And the roles are these: there is a predatory villain, there is an innocent victim, and there are heroes.

Jeffrey Lin:

And these stories that really hit the top of the news cycle, like the Petito case, and others in the past that parallel it are similar, have characters that fall cleanly in these roles. So Brian Laundrie is very cleanly into the predatory. He's on the run. We suspect very strongly, he has something to do with this. We want to talk to him. Everyone's looking for him. So he falls very cleanly into that role.

Jeffrey Lin:

Gabby falls very cleanly into the innocent victim role. She's this pretty young blonde woman, who lives a van life. A lot of viewers can sympathize or empathize with her life. That's another theme we'll get to.

Jeffrey Lin:

And then there's heroes, which are often police officers or law enforcement, but what social media allows is for all of us to be heroes. So now, if you're a TikTok sleuther, and you have their van on your footage, or you saw them, or you have evidence, then you can now share it with thousands or millions of followers. You are a hero.

Jeffrey Lin:

So that's kind of a lot of what we desire, I think, because these crimes make us feel helpless. And so when we feel like we can do something. This is also a fantasy we have, in these police shows and stuff, that we are the brilliant detective, that we are smarter than the villain. And so it allows us to live a certain fantasy as well.

Alyssa Hurst:

You sort of started talking about these high profile cases and these high profile crimes that have really captured the attention of the media. And JonBenet Ramsey's another, Nicole Brown Simpson's another. So how does this attention look different on social media than it did back when there was four channels and everybody was reading the same thing every day?

Jeffrey Lin:

That's a great question. I don't know if I have a full answer to this! That's a really, really good question. So obviously, the speed of the news cycle is different. And so if there was a break in the case in 1990, you wouldn't necessarily hear about it for a day or two or three days, or whenever the police decided to tell us. And so they have control over that information.

Jeffrey Lin:

Now media and law enforcement don't have control over all that information, and we can create these very powerful counter-narratives or sub-narratives on the outside. And so I think that's the real difference, is people had no power to launch counter-narrative, sub-narratives, to criticize law enforcement at that time.

Jeffrey Lin:

I mean, part of this story is also what we call in media studies, the faulty criminal justice frame. Which is the police don't do enough, or they're not trained enough, or they need outside help. And this is the whole thing about, there's this body cam footage released, and everyone is scouring that, and looking at her face, and looking at the scratches on his face, and saying, why didn't the police detain them? They had them.

Jeffrey Lin:

This also happened with Polly Klaas in 1996, which led to our three strikes laws. Richard Allen Davis was stopped by the police and they let him go, and so there's this reinforcement of the idea that the police need more help, or they're not good enough, or they are bumbling. It's kind of a Keystone Cops construction. That is a very prevailing construction.

Jeffrey Lin:

And it leads to two things. It leads to the notion that we need to protect ourselves, which leads to all kinds of things like firearm policy, and self-protection. But also that police need to bend the rules sometimes, too. And so that's another thing we see in police procedurals, which is the hero often bends the rules to seek justice. Or goes around the rules to seek justice. They rough up a suspect. They move evidence around in a certain way. They follow somebody and they're not allowed to follow, because the judge can't get the warrant signed in time. And it's the same construction, that the criminal justice system is faulty, that it can't do enough to protect us.

Jeffrey Lin:

Now that also speaks to how much we expect our criminal justice system to protect us; it cannot fully protect you. And yet anytime something happens like with Gabby, we fault the police very quickly for their actions. And we also want to think about the other side of that. Because at the same time that the Gabby Petito case is happening, we're also seeing a lot of instances of black people being mistreated by the police.

Jeffrey Lin:

And so also by saying the police should be detaining, the police should be behaving in an extremely surveillance and control-oriented way, I want us to apply that same framework to black motorists. So now, are you calling from more black motorists to be detained when they have a certain expression on their face? When someone in their car seems to be alarmed or in distress?

Jeffrey Lin:

So we think of these constructions with regard to the one case, like Gabby, but then if you pull out and think of all the cases in which this is going to be operant, it's what we call net-widening at that point. You can find examples throughout the criminal justice system of laws based on a small or singular number of cases that affect a much larger number of cases in ways that are unseen because those cases aren't in the news.

Alyssa Hurst:

So we've seen some positive outcomes of how having social media so involved. And it sounds like some tips may have led to actual breaks in the case from social media. How can social media maybe positively impact a case?

Jeffrey Lin:

I think in that way, sure. Like in this particular case, there have been actual evidentiary breaks: the van in the video, the body cam footage. In terms of the power of information, I think there's never been anything like it, where you can crowdsource across millions and millions of people, and you just aggregate this information. You think about that compared to what a singular police department could do and it's not even close. So this is just the reality. Now what you're also creating is a lot more noise. These are not professional investigators. The police are trained in this. That's why they do it.

Jeffrey Lin:

The other effect is it puts pressure on law enforcement. Think about the police department investigating Gabby Petito's disappearance, everything they do is under a microscope. And so if you're average police officer in Wyoming investigating this, you didn't know you'd be a public figure two weeks ago. You didn't know that someone in New York would know your name. And so now you're doing your work with the whole world watching you, which... I'm not a police officer, I can't say whether I want that, but I'm guessing no.

Alyssa Hurst:

I know with social media, we have the capability to edit almost everything. We have the capability to fake who we are. So what are some of the detriments that could come up, especially as a police force doesn't have a million people to run through and verify every single thing that comes through?

Jeffrey Lin:

I think that's what it is, when you can create any narrative you want. Me, I have no film editing skills, and I've edited YouTube videos together on my Mac. I can do that. If I can do that, anyone can do that. So you can create any narrative you want with the information or footage you have.

Jeffrey Lin:

And I think, given what we're talking about, that police department will have to reckon with that information if a lot of people are paying attention to it. So you create some kind of provocative narrative on your social media, and maybe it even starts to hit the mainstream media. And it just gives you no time. So anything that breaks, anything that changes, the whole world is evaluating that in real time with you, as opposed to you just having the professional space to evaluate what needs to be evaluated to allow for due process.

Jeffrey Lin:

Because that's the other thing we just a erased. This man has not been arrested. This man has not been tried. There's no definitive evidence that this person has committed a crime. Okay, now there's a lot of circumstantial evidence. We're getting to kind of OJ level stuff here. But there's no charge, there's no arraignment, there's no filing yet.

Alyssa Hurst:

So I'm curious also, as somebody who has studied how these crimes have played out in the media, not just social media, but the media, how does this affect the families? What does it look like for the families when there is this intense scrutiny?

Jeffrey Lin:

Man, I don't know. It can't be good. I mean, every time stuff like this happens... I have a kid, that's who I think of. But I think each family's affected differently. A victim's family might welcome it more because they're trying to solve this, and get closure. And again, I don't even want to pretend to put myself in their position. It's impossible to think about. And it's also impossible to think about Brian Laundrie's family, and what they're feeling and going through as well, as their child is villainized.

Jeffrey Lin:

And as someone who works with a lot of people who are incarcerated as well... I work inside of a prison, and I know a lot of people in that prison who've done things that they aren't proud of. And they, for years and years, have reckoned with how that has affected their family.

Alyssa Hurst:

I think we've weighed a lot of points here with social media, and the media in general, and the role that they play in cases like Gabby's. Do you have an estimation of whether you think social media is a helper, or something that hurts here? Is it good or is it bad? Or is it just much more complicated?

Jeffrey Lin:

I think it's really complicated. If you forced me to pick, twisted my arm and forced me to pick, I'd probably say bad, for all the reasons we kind of went through already. Obviously there are kind of potential benefits to it as well. But I just think, in terms of the investigation, yes, more evidence can be yielded, but it also creates a different dynamic with the law enforcement agency that could be harmful.

Jeffrey Lin:

And then I think in terms of cultural climate and discourse, I think it's very harmful because of the reasons we said. Because we're presuming guilt. Because a lot of people are assuming they have investigative abilities that they don't have. Because, as you said, you can mess with all of the evidence and create a false narrative. And so at least with the police, the police are complicated too, but they are professionally mandated to conduct this part of our governmental function.

Jeffrey Lin:

So from the law enforcement point of view, it's probably pretty negative. For Gabby's family, it's probably good, because you suddenly have a million quasi-police officers working for you. And if you're her family, you just want information. You just want to know what happened. You want closure.

Jeffrey Lin:

For Brian Laundrie's family, this is probably awful. So it depends on your perspective. For society, I would say this is bad. I think this whole immediate crowdsourcing and vengeance response that social media kind of creates, and that's around everything.

Alyssa Hurst:

So we've kind of drawn some parallels already between this case and others, but are there other cases that you would draw parallels to here? And what can we learn from drawing those parallels?

Jeffrey Lin:

Yeah, so I think the obvious one is one that is being talked about somewhat in the media, which is the fact that Gabby is young and pretty and white, and middle class, or upper middle class. That's nothing new. I think Gwen Ifill coined the phrase missing white woman syndrome in 2002 or 2003. And there are articles from that time that used that phrasing.

Jeffrey Lin:

And even before that, we understood that this was a thing. In death penalty research, one of the most powerful predictors of the death penalty is whether the victim was white. And especially whether the victim was a young white woman or a white woman.

Jeffrey Lin:

So I don't think we have to go too deep into the reasons that white women have a certain value in our society, a certain optical and social value in our society. That's a long conversation. But they do. And there are different reasons for that. It's not just that we're all a bunch of racists, but it's also institutional. So I really think about the institutional aspect of it.

Jeffrey Lin:

So number one, most of the people who run newsrooms are white and middle class, or upper middle class. That's just the way it is. And so whatever their implicit biases are, whatever their kind of identification patterns are, where they say that person seems sympathetic, and you don't exactly know why, or you're not saying why, but it's because that person resembles you, or your daughter, or your sister, or someone you know. Or people in your community. You know Gabby. That's the whole thing.

Jeffrey Lin:

And then that's true, of course, of the audience as well. The news watching and reading audience is disproportionately white and middle class as well. And so who are you sympathizing with?

Jeffrey Lin:

And you don't have to think that hard about this. When you hear about a disaster in Haiti, when you hear about a disaster in Saudi Arabia, when you hear about a disaster in Indonesia, does that generate anywhere near as much sympathy as this one missing girl in Wyoming?

Jeffrey Lin:

And again, this doesn't mean we're evil, it just means that we do have a kind of innate affinity for those that we see similarities to. And there are certain people that are making these decisions about newsworthiness.

Jeffrey Lin:

And now, back to our other conversation, we have the collective making decisions about newsworthiness on social media as well. So to the extent that that is disproportionately informed by white middle class voices, it's not a surprise that Gabby rises on both sides, in the mainstream and social media.

Jeffrey Lin:

And then just our whole cultural history of race, and what does blackness mean in America? What does Asianness mean in America? What is being Latinx mean in America? And what does it mean in terms of how much your life is valued, and the tolerance for your various behaviors? And the view of how much pain and suffering you can experience?

Jeffrey Lin:

So if you see that among professionals, then why wouldn't all society replicate this kind of bias to some extent. And I look around and I don't think it's so hard to see.

Alyssa Hurst:

And one of the things that I've been noticing on my own social media is people bringing up these people who are missing. There's so many missing and murdered indigenous women.

Jeffrey Lin:

Oh yeah, the 710 missing in the last decade in Wyoming. I showed my class that article the other day.

Alyssa Hurst:

And Jelani Day is a black student who went missing, they actually just identified his body. But he's been missing for a while, and his family was like, hey, pay attention to this.

Jeffrey Lin:

So you have a young black man, college student, and we know we don't know his name. And when you filter that through news agencies and social media, you see what gets the clicks. I think if you posted about a young missing black man, those institutions would see they're not getting as much viewership around that.

Jeffrey Lin:

What we don't want to do is say newsrooms are racist. What we want to say is we all have racialized tendencies, our society has racialized tendencies, and newsrooms reflect that. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

Alyssa Hurst:

So do you have any thoughts on how social media might be able to be harnessed to be an effective tool in missing person cases, that we don't necessarily pay attention to in the mainstream media?

Jeffrey Lin:

I don't have expertise, but I can imagine something where, maybe if law enforcement agencies or investigative agencies had somewhat more control over the actual pieces they were looking for. And they do that. So, you do get the posters and notices that are saying we're looking for this license plate, we're looking for this car of this description, we're looking for this person. Have you seen this grainy video surveillance shot? Have you seen this per...

Jeffrey Lin:

And so they do ask for our help in that way. But I think what's happened with this case and others is it has totally spun out their hands, and they don't control it anymore. So that now they have to reckon with all this evidence and deal with all this evidence that may or may not be useful, but there's public pressure coming with it.

Jeffrey Lin:

But I also am reluctant to say police agencies should have more control, because that's a whole other conversation as well. So that's why I don't really have a good answer, because I can't think of a system that doesn't have a pretty serious cost. You know what I mean?

Alyssa Hurst:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I wonder too, with mainstream media and newspapers and TV stations, you have who gets hired. You have all of these other systems at play, in terms of race in particular, but social media is a bit more democratized. Anybody can get involved in a conversation and anything can go viral. And I wonder if there's any power in that, in elevating cases that don't always get attention?

Jeffrey Lin:

I guess one thing I would ask us to think about: media has a hierarchy. You have one station, above another station, above another station. Or The Sean Hannity Show is the leading this, or whatever. Social media has something similar: who has the most followers? I don't have social media accounts. I think I'm reasonably interesting to talk to, but not a lot of people are listening, because I'm not broadcasting to thousands, hundred of thousands, or millions of people. So who has more voice on social media? And that follows those same contours. So if it's wealthy white people on social media that have the most followers, then what they call attention to is what we're going to pay attention to.

Jeffrey Lin:

Now, you're saying, okay, social media is also allowing these counter stories about missing people of color, those cases that don't receive attention. But how many followers do those folks have versus the people that are pushing for van images of Gabby and Brian?

Alyssa Hurst:

Yeah. That's a great point.

Jeffrey Lin:

So I think our culture has a certain structure and hierarchy, and that's reflected in all forms of media. Now, is it purely reflected? I don't know. I think social media is more democratic, because it's not just how many followers you have that determines whether your story elevates. It's also how interesting the story is, it's also, does someone else famous pick it up? But if no one famous, or no one with a lot of followers picks it up...

Jeffrey Lin:

And now we want to think about those influencers at the top. Who are they? What's their profile? The people you really are trying to get to pick up your story, the ones that could amplify what you're saying, what does that array of people look like?

Jeffrey Lin:

And they're benefiting. So if you're that white woman on Instagram, you're the one getting more followers because of this. We don't want to think of this as some altruistic, public search for a pure and innocent girl. Which to some extent it is. It's also profiteering on the parts of some of these people.

Jeffrey Lin:

And there was an article, I think today or yesterday, that I read that basically, it was quoting one of these influencers saying, yeah, I started posting all this Gabby Petito stuff, and then my followers blew up, and I'm getting all this attention, and so I'm basically spending even more of my life doing this.

Alyssa Hurst:

So kind of building off of that, actually, that's a nice segue. Do you have a sense of why, more existentially, humans are just really drawn to true crime? And why it's having this huge, huge moment, and kind of always has captured our attention?

Jeffrey Lin:

Yeah, it's always captured our attention, in part because it's somewhat rare. It's unusual. So it's a number of things we talked about already: one is we're just interested in the unusual. And so when you think about the phrase true crime and what it means, it doesn't mean jaywalking! It's not like, here's a two hour special of people jaywalking in Berkeley. You know what I mean? And that technically is true crime. But among the street crimes, homicide is the rarest. It's very difficult to do that, and it doesn't happen that much, and the punishment is severe.

Jeffrey Lin:

And so all this true crime, it's true technically, but it's also biased in the same way it's picking and choosing. Robert Durst, or Adnan Syed, or whatever, these really interesting cases that are also highly unusual because the person was very wealthy and famous, because, in the case of Serial... Serial's a little different, because it was this long-form investigation of this relatively unknown case. But you look what happened with that, that led to an army of sleuthing around the Adnan Syed case.

Jeffrey Lin:

When the Robert Durst thing came out, you were probably talking about it, everyone's talking about it. It's on social media, it's interacting with these other things. I watched it because I was like, I feel kind of left out, everyone watched it. But the more stuff you know, the more you can relate to others. And if five people are talking about Robert Durst, you jump in there, and then you feel part of that. And again, it's what counts as true crime are the more unusual ones. So there's that part of it.

Jeffrey Lin:

And then again, right back to the beginning, the roles are so clear. There are innocent victims, there are predatory villains, and then there are a bunch of job openings for heroes, basically. We're hiring. That's part of it.

Jeffrey Lin:

And I think there is some research that shows that the further away you are from that horror, the more you kind of obsess over it. For example, the most violent kind of brutal metal music comes from the most peaceful countries. So if you ever listen to metal music from like Norway or Sweden, it's really brutal, and violent, and Satanic, and rough, and the cultural argument is made is yeah, because it's all fantasy to them, because they don't actually experience these things, and so they're allowed to explore it as fantasy.

Jeffrey Lin:

Whereas if you think of rap music that comes from low income, high violence communities, they don't rap about violence in a fantastical way, they tend to rap about it in a very embellished but realistic way. Because it's real. Because they've either experienced it, or they're pretending to experience it.

Jeffrey Lin:

Our violence rates are low. Our crime rates are dropping for 20-something years. And so especially for the middle and upper middle class, there's almost no exposure to violent crime in real life. If there's exposure to your typical violent crime, simple assault, things like that.

Jeffrey Lin:

So crime is not real in your life. It's a story. It's a series of stories that are told to you. And what do you like about stories? You like good stories. You don't like boring stories. So if crime is a story, is a fiction, in your life, you want it to be entertaining. It is entertainment. If crime is not a fiction in your life, if crime is real, you're probably quite a bit less interested in reading tales of crime and true crime. That's generalizing, but the research bears that out as well.

Alyssa Hurst:

Is there anything that we haven't talked about yet that you've thought of, or that's come to mind, that you want to share?

Jeffrey Lin:

I guess just my final thought would be that the challenge that we're left with is how do we deliver a more equalized weight to cases that don't fit these clean cultural narratives, or don't have the characteristics that make them popular?

Jeffrey Lin:

And it's kind of something I work on in all aspects of my working life, which is to humanize people. And to make that young missing black man the same level of human as Gabby Petito. To show that his family is suffering. To show that whatever happened to him is an equal tragedy to this other person. And it's not about comparing, but it's just about delivering justice as equally as possible. We don't do that very well in this country, and this is just another aspect of that.

Jeffrey Lin:

And I think the kind of root change that needs to happen, and I don't know how to make this happen, even though I'm trying, is to develop sympathy for those who are different from you, who don't have your characteristics, who might live far away. I think there are smarter people that can work on that project than me, but I think that's the cultural challenge that sits underneath a lot of the issues we've been talking about today.

Alyssa Hurst:

To learn more about the intersections of crime and media visit our show notes at du.edu/radioed. Tamara Chapman is our managing editor. James Swearingen arranged our theme. I'm Alyssa Hurst, RadioEd's executive producer and today's host. This is RadioEd.