#cybersleuths: The Idaho Murders: Season Review – A docu-series highlighting how internet sleuthing can sabotage a complicated case

Season 1

 

 

Episode Guide

Episode 1: “Collateral Damage”
Episode 2: “Citizen Detective” 
Episode 3: “Crime Goes Viral” 

 

As long as there is crime, humans will be interested in true crime stories and documentaries. Over the years, there has been an uncountable number of news reports, blogs, documentaries and shows following true crime cases.

With the advent of technology, websites like YouTube feature many channels that did investigative work on popular cases and broke down the nature of crime for viewers. After YouTube, content creators on the social networking app TikTok have started investigating crime cases all thanks to the popularity of the genre.

These content creators also known as Internet Sleuths often seem to do more harm than good to ongoing murder cases and the University of Idaho quadruple murders of 2022 is one such case.

On the night of November 13th 2022, four University of Idaho students were fatally stabbed in an off-campus six-bedroom residence in Idaho. In December of the same year, 28-year-old Bryan Christopher Kohberger was arrested for the murders.

The Paramount+ three-part docuseries – #cybersleuths: The Idaho Murders narrates the story of the quadruple murders through a different lens. The documentary uses interviews with content creators who “sleuth” on the cases using the information available on the internet.

We also see the family members of victims, FBI agents, real crime reporters and more discuss the perils of internet sleuthing. The show follows the stories of these cyber sleuths who scour the internet to bring out new content for viewers.

The documentary mainly highlights the dark side of internet sleuthing and how these cyber detectives overcomplicate the case rather than helping cops solve the crime.

From their testimonies, it can be seen that these cyber sleuths often think they are beyond the law. #cybersleuths also explores how these internet detectives made false accusations in their YouTube and TikTok videos, leading to unwarranted suspicion of innocent people who had nothing to do with the case.

The documentary also goes into detail to explore how this internet sleuthing could have helped the suspect – Bryan Kohberger because every detail on the case was available on the internet, all thanks to the sleuths.

Throughout the documentary, it was evident that some of the internet sleuths were entitled and believed that just by saying the words “allegedly” and “reportedly”, they would get away with any accusations they made as well as the narratives they tried to perpetuate.

The three-part series explores how other than solving the case at hand, the police and the law had to focus their energies on trying to stop these internet sleuths from making baseless accusations. The false accusations made by the sleuths caused bullying of innocents, the survivors who we already traumatised because of the murder, and traumatising of the families of the victims.

We also see how some of these content creators went above and beyond to bring out new information about the case only to boost their channel/platform. We can also see how the motive behind internet sleuthing is not for justice for the victims but for increasing the monetisation on their platforms.

#cybersleuths: The Idaho Murders highlights that the real motive of these content creators is to make “internet sleuthing” their full-time job when qualified detectives are doing the same thing without broadcasting the evidence online.

On the other hand, a positive outcome of internet sleuthing could be that the case blowing up on the internet and the constant interference of the cyber sleuths gave the Idaho murder case a much-needed urgency, prompting cops to work on finding the truth behind the murders as soon as possible. The show offers insight into the harms of believing everything on the internet.

#cybersleuths: The Idaho Murders urges viewers to stop buying into conspiracy theories presented by internet sleuths who only have their monetary interest at heart. These sleuths do not have any incentive from the murder case being solved but are focused on bringing more clout to their platform.


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  • Verdict - 8/10
    8/10
8/10

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