“The moment Paul Ansell KNEW he messed up” is the name of a video on YouTube. It’s a clip of Paul talking a few days after his girlfriend of 12 years, Nicola Bulley, went missing. The short clip slows down when Paul, who looks upset, stops in the middle of a statement.Text on the screen makes it look like the 45-year-old was about to say “there is no evidence,” but he stops himself. The video is trying to show that this small part of an interview with a man who was going through a lot of mental turmoil, the likes of which most of us have never or will never experience, is proof that he had something to do with his partner going missing.
It’s cheap, rude, and mean. But nearly 30,000 people have watched it.
Since the mortgage expert disappeared at the end of January, this is how Nicola Bulley’s family has been treated. Even as their lives were falling apart, people on the internet came to pick at the broken pieces.
It shows that there is no longer any connection between social media and real life. The internet used to be a mirror of real life, even if it was slightly distorted, cropped, and filtered. Now, for a lot of people online, movies are what life is like. On the altar of content, you can give up police resources, the privacy of the family, and the image of Nicola’s partner.
There are a lot of channels that use Nicola’s story as a buffet of material. People have even written books about it, saying to tell the “real truth” about it.
A recent apology from Curtis Arnold of Curtis Media, the channel that posted the incredibly rude video of Mr. Ansell that I talked about above, really jumped out.
When Mr. Arnold was criticised for sharing a TikTok of Nicola’s body being taken out of the River Wyre, he took the video down and said, “Maybe I didn’t think about the family at the time.”This is where the whole show put on by these stations falls apart. Mr. Arnold’s TikTok proudly says that it is getting “justice for those who can’t”. “Media done differently” is what his YouTube account says it is all about.
So that’s one way to say it. But our modern-day Sherlock Holmes’s search for justice didn’t seem to include removing the video he apologised for from YouTube, where fans of “media done differently” can still see the dead body of a mother of two being pulled from a river.
Internet sleuths are not doing anything to help Nicola and her family get justice. They are treating them as though they were pieces of meat. Most of the time, they make things worse. In his apology, Mr. Arnold said that people had come to his house, shared his address on social media, and destroyed his car. That is wrong. But I wonder if, even for a second, it made him think of what happened to Nicola’s friends in St. Michael’s on Wyre, where they were constantly harassed.
But it doesn’t seem to matter that they are lying. Armchair detectives can make a 30-minute movie of themselves rambling incoherently from one half-baked theory to the next, and people will still say it’s the best investigative journalism since Watergate. Mr. Arnold is still putting up new videos on YouTube. One of them is almost at 20,000 views.The best and worst thing about the internet is that it has made media more accessible to everyone. Now, anyone can pick up a camera, call themselves a journalist, and report on a disaster. In a lot of ways, that’s great.
The problem is that this includes people who only see these events as a chance to get clicks. And with so much information out there, how can anyone tell what they can trust?
Mainstream media has a big part to play in this, which some people say they haven’t been doing. This was made clear by Nicola’s family’s heartbreaking final statement, in which they said that ITV and Sky News kept in touch with them even after they asked for privacy. ITV has sent their “sincerest condolences” and said they will “cooperate fully” with an Ofcom request for information, while Sky is thought to be working closely with the watchdog.
Any way you look at it, the search for Nicola Bulley should wake you up. Unchecked nonsense is popular on social media because we are becoming more and more disconnected from reality. It’s also partly because both the media and the cops have lost people’s trust, and it’s up to both to win it back. Even though the sludge that pours out of TikTok every day is dangerous to touch, that doesn’t mean that Nicola’s family has a right to say bad things about the rest of the media. We should all do better.
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