Nancy Guthrie, TikTok sleuths, and Starmer's cringeposting era

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0:30to bbc.com and the BBC app. Find out more at bbc.com slash unlimited. You know the Keir Starmer video with the dire straits? Yes. And the F-35 jets? Yes. That's been deleted from his TikTok. Has it? I was trying to pull it up and it's not there anymore. Oh, wow. Felt cute, might delete later. The essence of very much. Our number one priority is protecting our people. I think that shows there's some awareness that whatever Keir Starmer's TikTok account is doing, it's not working in some ways. Yes, with everything that's been happening with Iran and the United States and Israel and the United Kingdom, Keir Starmer has been posting on TikTok and his content has been popping off in a way that it doesn't usually.

1:18But what is quite hard to tell is how much it's popping off because the content is performing well and people like it, or how much it's popping off because people are finding it a bit cringe and are sort of taking the mick. Some people think they're intentionally being cringe. But I think in this episode, we should talk about why TikTok works for some politicians, like why it works for Mum Donnie, why it works for Zach Polanski. Donald Trump. Donald Trump. And why it doesn't work as well for people like Keir Starmer. So we're going to chat about that. We're also today going to chat about this case involving, well, the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie.

1:50You might have heard about it. She's the mum of a very famous presenter, journalist in the US. And it has triggered a whole wave of social media content, particularly from what we often refer to as sleuths. People turning up at the scene. I love the way you said sleuths. Sleuths. Or sitting on their sofas and posting content. What does this frenzy mean? We are going to unpick it and figure out whether it's helpful or unhelpful. You're a bit of an internet sleuth yourself. I'm an internet sleuth about internet sleuths. Yeah, but this isn't the first sleuth story by any means. There's a long history of sleuths.

2:23We should get into that. We'll get into that as well, exactly. The history of the sleuths.

2:34So who is Nancy Guthrie? What's going on with that story? So Nancy Guthrie is the mum of a really famous television presenter, to journalist Savannah Guthrie in the US. She presents NBC's Today. She's on primetime telly in the United States, which is one of the reasons why this case has got so much attention and she's been trying to rally some of that attention too, understandably, because her mum has now been missing for over a month. She's elderly, she has health problems, and what the evidence suggests is that she was abducted in the middle of the night from her home. At first, she wears a pacemaker and they thought they might be able to track her for a period of time, but then that wasn't possible.

3:13And one of the reasons why this has been popping up all over the place on social media is because there's been some really quite scary viral footage that's been shared. This Ring doorbell camera footage was released and it shows someone in a balaclava. It's like really terrifying going up to the door. And the family had said that, you know, they'd pay huge amounts of money for information or for her return. And it was suggested that they were demanding a ransom the people that had taken Nancy Guthrie. But there really hasn't been, at least outwardly, that much progress in terms of what's gone on here.

3:41So at the heart of this, there's incredibly tragic story of a family who've lost their elderly mother who has a pacemaker and they're probably terrified. But as far as the Internet's concerned, this has all the hallmarks of a true crime story. It's a celebrity's family member. It's a mystery. We don't know where they've gone. It seems like a neo-noir or like a kind of Fargo type story. So how has the Internet been interpreting this? Yeah, so particularly disappearances, I would say, and particularly disappearances that become high profile, whether it's because there's a huge amount of kind of publicity around them or because it relates to someone who's well known.

4:14They certainly, as of late, have frequently inspired these frenzies on social media where everyone's looking for answers. And I mean, it's kind of human nature, right? Like, you're curious as to what's gone on here. You've got some clues that you can start to piece together, but you don't really know what's happened. You've also got the police dealing with the case, the FBI getting involved as well. And, you know, there's been some criticism over the way that they've handled this. There were suggestions that the crime scene wasn't secured properly or that like that there have been different points where they haven't necessarily been as transparent or as clear as they could have been.

4:45They have generally defended their approach to this case. But when you've got that vacuum of information, it's the perfect place for the sleuths or the kind of social media influencers who like posting about true crime to get involved, get stuck in and to try and essentially kind of participate in what ends up feeling a little bit like a game, I would say. And when it comes to this case, I mean, there are some influencers who are just posting like updates, information. They're just reading what's coming out of from the authorities or from the family or what have you. But then there are others who are posting stuff that is actively misleading or disinformation.

5:22So, for example, the sheriff has cleared the family members as suspects. But nonetheless, there continues to be a huge amount of speculation that members of Nancy Guthrie's family are somehow behind this or linked to it, in spite of what the authorities have said. And then a bandmate of Nancy Guthrie's son-in-law was wrongly named as a person of interest. And that meant that his home got like mobbed, essentially, because the influences we're talking about here. Some of them are actually turning up like they're kind of investigators and just filming content like close to the crime scene. Yeah, I've seen people on TikTok posing outside the house where this horrible thing happened.

6:00So have you spoken to any of these influencers? Why are they doing it? The most extreme influencers, like the people who are actually turning up at homes or posting the most egregious disinformation, don't tend to want to chat to you. the people that I've chatted to are what I would consider in that kind of like middle bucket of like they're posting quite a lot of content often like factually accurate sometimes going down certain routes and rabbit holes but what's hard in cases like this are we actually don't have the answers about what's happened broadly like we don't know where Nancy Guthrie is or who's taken her right now so it's hard to kind of outright rule out some of what's being said the more extreme conspiracy theories we'll get to in a minute but one of the influencers who I spoke to is this woman called Lindsay Rust-Purper.

6:43And essentially, she kind of aggregates information about the case from her apartment in New York. I'm back on the case of Nancy Guthrie, and we had a great live tonight. We actually spoke to one of Nancy's neighbours, and she gave us an update that we haven't been hearing from others. I asked her quite a lot about why she's doing this, like what is the motivator. And she said that for most of the sleuths and the other people in this ecosystem online, is about trying to actually solve the case. Obviously, there are online sleuths that their purpose is to solve this case. But for me, I think mine is more just like aggregated recaps that I was finding all over the internet.

7:26And then people started coming to me with exclusive information. I do think that the people on social media could solve the case. And it's not just my opinion that the organization of this investigation has been poor. And, you know, I think that the FBI and sheriff's department could be caught up in an old way of thinking. And I think that there's a lot of people on the Internet that are trying to solve this and not for the reward. I think because they are genuinely they have the means to do it. However rare, there are some examples where internet sleuths have kind of found out something about a crime.

8:09Yeah, like Gabby Petito. Gabby Petito was killed by her boyfriend at the time they were traveling, but they'd obviously posted quite a lot of content on social media. And as a consequence, it meant that people essentially figured out where she'd been killed and where her body was and all of this stuff. And that was a real sort of, I don't know if boost is the right word, but it really turbocharged this social media community because it was an example of where like, oh, actually, we've managed to figure some things out using effectively like open source techniques where you're looking at content before the authorities did.

8:40And therefore, let's keep doing it because we might get to the bottom of it. Yeah. And the OG example of that is Don't Fuck With Cats, which obviously kind of idolized the internet sleuth. And they were trying to find that guy who was like killing cats, essentially. Exactly. And they did, right? But those cases are very rare. And I think the majority of internet sleuth cases end up being problematic and misled. And we can get into why. But a good example of that is the Boston Marathon bombing, where the Reddit forum that is devoted to this kind of internet sleuthing, which has over a million subscribers, it's a huge part of the internet, started basically pointing out people in the crowd.

9:20and it became kind of like a racist where's Waldo or where's Wally, as you call it here. There you go. Because it was like any kind of non-white person in the crowd pictured, you know, some of them were identified by Reddit and then they were sent threatening messages. People showed up outside their homes. And this is one of the huge risks of this kind of social media sleuthing, which is when people are putting out information that is not verified just based on like, oh, I've spotted this or I've seen this and then it ends up being a problem. And I asked Lindsay a bit about how she verifies what she's posting.

9:53I've been really, really careful about sharing anything more than what I've heard, you know, directly from a neighbor or that we have confirmed, whether it's through, you know, the FBI or the Pima County Sheriff's Department. I really haven't done much of sharing any theories that I have or I mean I'm getting stuff from about psychics or mediums talking about where she is I'm getting the craziest videos all day long and I really don't share anything that is not directly from those sources I previously mentioned so one of the sources for example that that she does use is like she'll look at kind of like flight trackers and radars and that sort of thing and flight logs and she talks about like seeing that a flight had landed at a particular time around the vicinity area where nancy guthrie lives and then it had gone to mexico and therefore was nancy guthrie in mexico and she'd sent that tip off into the fbi into the authorities and it's really hard to say well hang on that's misinformation or wrong because ultimately right now we we don't know where she is so like it's almost like the kind of subversion of open source techniques which are broadly valuable things like People can look at all sorts of publicly available information to piece together stories.

11:08But the issue here is that you've got people who are just kind of like deciding perhaps to have a crack at it. And actually, like when I've investigated other cases, people might remember there was a woman called Nicola Bulley who went missing. She died in Lancashire in the UK. And there was this huge frenzy on social media and all kinds of like really extreme conspiracy theories. And then also the Idaho murders that happened in the US. these students who got killed in their student house, which was, again, terrible and just inspired so much misinformation. And I really pushed Lindsay on what happens when, you know, actually the people posting on social media misidentify someone and can effectively like ruin their life, tarnish their reputation.

11:43People with really, really big followings are being not as careful about, you know, throwing out the names or their theories of who they think is involved. And that to me is where, you know, I don't want to get involved on that level. And I agree, it's wasting time. And to me, what I'm frustrated with is the sheriff or FBI have asked the public to help in finding the perpetrator, the abductor, and they're not giving us some of the important information that we need. And so it is leaving people kind of scrambling and placing blame in places they shouldn't. So who else have you spoken to? So another person I spoke to is this guy called Jordan Rohn.

12:33My entry into the Nancy Guthrie investigation has come by way of me being a former criminal prosecutor here in Pennsylvania and working on cases with some of the best detectives in the country and taking cases to trial and having evidence in front of me and analyzing that. and really putting the puzzle together. He posts on TikTok as well. He's got his mic out. He's analysing stuff, often basing it on legitimate things like Google Trends, for example. So he'll use open source information to piece things together. The issue is that some of his videos are accurate and analytical. Others really dip into the kind of conspiratorial and more.

13:15And I asked him a little bit about how he ensures that he's not posting things that are inaccurate? In the world of investigations, of course, there are going to be different leads or theories that turn out to be inaccurate. And I mean, quite frankly, the fact that this case hasn't been solved yet leads me to say confidently that, you know, so far all the theories are disproven until they are one of them is proven right. Before any videos go out, before I even film any videos, the information's already been turned over to the FBI. And And that gives them the opportunity, I think, to go through the lead, to investigate it on their own.

13:56And for instance, I've sent over actual geographic locations that I think that they should search. And I give them the opportunity to go and search that location without having any public interference or people who follow me on TikTok going and disrupting the scene. But I did also challenge him on, so for example, there's this one video he posted where he talks about how because Savannah Guthrie, Nancy Guthrie's daughter, had done an interview with some of Jeffrey Epstein's victims, that somehow this could be connected to Jeffrey Epstein or the former Prince Andrew. A million dollar reward is offered.

14:33Crickets. Savannah offers to pay the ransom. We get no proof of life. Why is that? Because whoever's behind this already got paid by the person who ordered the hit. And it wasn't pocket change. We're talking millions from a very wealthy person or entity with deep pockets. And I really pushed him on this because, you know, it feels like adding together one on one and getting three. And ultimately, his perspective is, well, I can just put the information out there and people can make up their own minds. Law enforcement obviously decides what is actionable and what's not, but I think silence doesn't help anyone.

15:05So we do know that, for instance, with Jeffrey Epstein, actually it was the FBI themselves that released the information who said that he had bank accounts set up in Grand Junction, Colorado, which happens to be the location that I found five different search spikes taking place prior to Nancy's abduction searching for her address. So I think it's really a responsibility on my part to put information that I find out into the public square and let people analyze and dissect it as they see fit. To be clear, both of the influencers that I chatted to seem to have, you know, like genuine intentions.

15:42They're not people posting like the most extreme disinformation and they're certainly not the people turning up at the home or invading anyone's privacy, anything like that. Those are the more extreme influences, but ultimately they all exist as part of this kind of social media sleuth world. The sleuthing stuff is kind of a microcosm for everything that's wrong with the internet. This impulse to see it as a kind of mystery, as a true crime mystery to solve with clues everywhere is the same kind of impulse that's led people to come up with QAnon, to, you know, Pizzagate, anti-vax theories. It's so participatory, isn't it?

16:17Yeah, but the idea that like police work is participatory is ludicrous. Like leave it to the police. But then I guess, and this is what's difficult about these cases, particularly disappearances, is there's often a real willingness from, understandably from the family to like publicize this, to get people engaged with it. The downside of that is that everyone gets kind of too engaged and then you have like false accusations and then you have people sometimes forgetting at times, not the people I chatted to, but I'd say the wider influencer network, forgetting that this is real people. Like there is a real woman who is currently missing and a family that's hugely affected by that.

16:50Yeah, absolutely. But what is it about social media that makes people thrust themselves into this like neo-noir detective? Well, I'd say there's two things. It's like the great sort of leveling that social media has contributed to, which is everyone can take part. Sitting on your SETI, whatever, out and about. You have a mobile phone. You can film content. You can make stuff. And not just that you can make stuff, but point two, that stuff is rewarded. You get views. You get likes. You get engagement. and speaking to both Lindsay and Jordan they kept reiterating like for me this isn't about the views for me this isn't about the likes but then like there was a bit where Jordan was like you know it's not just about that and like ultimately you do get a reward in so much as whether it's just the feeling of people viewing and engaging with and liking your content and it's a topic you find interesting or whether in some cases and I've met quite a few kind of social media sleuths who've actually been able to monetize their content like they've basically turned it into a job they've been able to to use the monetization schemes on the different platforms and get money it's like the company's business models and just like algorithmic models incentivize this kind of behavior and actually the more extreme and the more outrageous and the you know if you can come up with a new hot take you're going to get more engagement have you heard of the texas sharpshooter fallacy yeah yeah where like a guy shoots a blank page a bunch of times then draws the bullseye around it.

18:10That's what people are doing. They're basically seeing clusters of unrelated incidents and questions and arranging them into a neat theory. There's been some really interesting research that's been done about the brains of people that believe conspiracy theories or the kind of attributes that they possess. There's two really like key indicators. One is like rigidity of thought. So like the inability to adapt what you believe or think based on the evidence in front of you. The other thing is all about like pattern recognition. Like it's basically like spotting patterns where they actually don't exist the last thing i'd say about these kinds of sleuths and influencers is that they're often like really like nice normal like i mean like they've got kind of quirky hobbies i guess but like nice normal interesting people and that is the other issue here which is i think that social media like desensitizes you to the impact of this content particularly when it can be negative and defamatory or cause harm if we post a video and like loads of other people who are interested in this content are like watching it engaging with it commenting on it.

19:03Obviously, we think that's normal. It distorts your perception of what is socially acceptable.

19:16At the top of this episode, we were speaking about this Keir Starmer video, why TikTok works for some people, not for Keir Starmer. So I actually spoke to some insiders and people who led the digital strategy campaigns for some of the biggest elections in Western democracies in the past 10 years. And one of the things that people said was that authenticity on TikTok is really important. So they tried this with Rishi Sunak. They tried to have him in front of a bunch of F-35 fighter jets, making him out to be kind of James Bond. It didn't work. It came across as cringe because he's not that person.

19:51And so then they shifted the strategy to kind of having him in front of a whiteboard, being a bit geeky. Yeah. And I guess at the heart of that is when the person and the type of content like match or don't match up with each other. Yeah. And the kind of digital political consultants I spoke to said that with Keir Starmer, he should just be presented as a kind of studious, lawyerly person or talking about football because of the two areas where he can be genuine. So there's this question, right? Why does it work for Trump? Why does it work for Mumdani? Why does it work for Farage and Polanski, but not for Keir Starmer.

20:22And I spoke to Sean Topham from the firm Topham Guerem, and they're the guys who, they kind of did the first political shitpost, which was for Boris Johnson's campaign when they put Get Brexit Done, his slogan in Comic Sans, which they did because they knew it would piss people off. That felt like peak Twitter era as well. Like I remember everyone reacting to that. Exactly. So I asked them about this and they're clearly very proud of this because it set the internet on fire. they quite cleverly got their message out of Boris Johnson wants to get Brexit done in as wide as way as possible, kind of by rage baiting people.

20:58Now, I asked him about the Keir Starmer stuff as, you know, is this a rage bait? Is he doing cringe stuff on purpose? And he said that the ultimate effect of this, if people see him as cringe, if they don't see him as authentic in the way that it kind of does work with Boris Johnson, does work with Trump, is that it actually makes people like him less. You know, if they're sharing it because it's cringe, it can have a real, real adverse impact on the communicator as someone who's actually out of touch, someone who's a tourist in the Internet rather than, you know, a participant. And so there is a real important authenticity test that, you know, politicians need to ask themselves before they go into these spaces.

21:36Because if you do it with sort of wit and confidence, you know, you can kind of survive any of the hostility or rage. But if there's any trepidation or it feels inauthentic to that communicator, it can really come back to bite you. And I worry, you know, for care and trying to lean into this space. It feels fundamentally jarring when we see him trying to be this sort of commander in chief type because I don't feel he's proposed himself in that way. So it can feel inconsistent with what we think we know about him. And you can try and predict how social media users are going to respond and everyone's going to respond, but you can't always tell what's going to stick and what's going to fly.

22:17And like if we think of like recent elections where social media campaigns have been very effective. So take like Zoran Mandani, who is now the mayor of New York. His campaign was so effective because for people who like him, it made him more likable. It was like, oh, this guy's like us. He's genuine. He's authentic. He cares about these issues. Like he was turning up on like nights out and people were filming him. He was doing like these videos that felt like in line with trends that were happening on TikTok, but not in that way that Kamala Harris did, which was sort of like, remember Brat Summer and everything else that felt like a little bit like just a little bit too late.

22:46Like you'd be like, oh, that's kind of like when your mum finds a meme or your dad finds a meme and they think it's funny. Whereas it felt legitimate. And the same could be said of Zach Polanski, the Green Party leader as well. He recently got chosen to be the leader of that party. It feels like he gets it and like he gets how it works. Like, does Starmer really know what's going on with these montages? Like, is he the mastermind behind them? Like, I imagine not. Maybe he is. But with the others, it feels like they could be even when they're not. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And with Momdani and Polanski, if you have a simple message that's in opposition to something, that does well in a short video.

23:24Therefore, it does well on TikTok. When you're like a sitting Labour prime minister, it's very hard to think, like, what is your TikTok life going to be, right? Because you're not really like opposing, like it's not like you've not got the same goal, I guess. And that's the thing as well. Like during an election campaign, it's like you're the goal of a lot of this content is to both energize your base and to reach like undecided people who might not have heard of you. Like ideally what you want is to pop up at the top of people's social media feeds and then they'll think, oh, I hadn't heard of this person before, but now I'm kind of interested in their stuff.

23:53Actually, in a weird way, if we look at Keir Starmer's content and the reaction to it, if it's not ironically cringe, which like it could be, but nonetheless, it feels like a lot of people aren't responding to it like it's ironically cringe, then ultimately it feels like they'd almost be better to not post anything at all than to post things that users are saying, well, that's kind of weird, if they want to be popular, quote unquote. Yeah, and what people have spoken to have said is that now that you can't really target political advertisements in the same way you used to on social media, because everyone's on TikTok, all you can really do is grow your following so that when the election comes, you've got a big following to then target with content.

24:32But also, you no longer need to have a viral account to make a viral piece of content. And so they're always trying, what's the video? What's the meme that's going to make, that we're going to get, that's going to go viral, that's going to secretly get our message across, which is about how amazing the prime minister is. You know, 10 years ago, you definitely wanted to have a million followers, 100 ,000 followers. That was a great benchmark test, but you could have 2000 followers now and reach, you know, five, 10 million people with, you know, very good content. And the thing is, Sean told me that you're not just competing with other politicians.