True crime is everywhere.

It’s on Netflix, on podcasts, on TikTok, on Reddit threads and in YouTube breakdowns with millions of views. Cases that once would have been covered mainly by local reporters and investigators now become internet obsessions overnight, with every update turned into content and every new detail treated like a clue. TIME argued this clearly in its coverage of the University of Idaho murders, noting how true-crime fascination and TikTok-fueled speculation helped spread misinformation and target innocent people.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, social media has made everyone think they are a detective.

At first glance, that might not seem like a bad thing. Public attention can help keep a case in the spotlight. Families often want their loved ones’ stories shared. Communities can spread photos, timelines and verified information faster than ever before. In some situations, public attention really can pressure institutions to take a case seriously. Even TIME noted that public interest can sometimes help cases, which is why online sleuthing often gets framed as a form of digital citizenship instead of what it usually becomes.

But that’s not normally where it stops.

What starts as attention can quickly turn into interference or what starts as concern can spiral into conspiracy and what starts as people wanting justice can become people treating a genuine tragedy like an interactive game.

That’s the problem with online sleuth culture. Too many people no longer want to simply follow a case; they want to solve it. They want to be the first person to connect the dots, post the theory, make the video or point the finger. TikTok, Reddit and other platforms reward that kind of behavior. The most cautious person in the room rarely goes viral. The person saying, “We don’t know enough yet,” will almost always lose to the person confidently claiming they figured it all out.

Criminal investigations, like journalists, are supposed to rely on evidence, verification and care. Social media runs on speed, reaction and engagement. Those two things do not mix nearly as well as people pretend they do. The internet doesn’t reward patience. It rewards certainty, even when certainty is fake.

That should scare us, because we have already seen what happens when online crowds start acting like law enforcement. After the Boston Marathon bombing, Reddit users tried to crowdsource the identity of the suspects and ended up wrongly identifying innocent people. The New Yorker later argued that the problem was not just that the crowd failed, but that criminal investigations are especially vulnerable to groupthink, incomplete information and false confidence when handled by online mobs.

That same pattern has only become worse in the TikTok era.

The University of Idaho murders showed just how destructive viral amateur detective work can be. TIME reported that social media users flooded TikTok and other platforms with theories, accusations and conspiracies, often dragging in innocent people with no evidence. CBS News separately reported on the defamation lawsuit filed by University of Idaho professor Rebecca Scofield after TikToker Ashley Guillard falsely accused her of involvement in the murders.

A person falsely identified online does not simply disappear from the story once the facts come out. Social media moves on quickly, but the damage it leaves behind does not. The professor accused in the Idaho case is proof that a baseless online theory is not harmless gossip. It can become defamation, humiliation and long-term reputational damage.

And the people making those accusations often do not act like they understand the weight of what they are doing. They speak in the language of fandom. They “deep dive.” They “analyze clues.” They make charts, edits, timelines and reaction videos. They zoom in on body language and turn random details into supposed proof. They treat a murder case like a season of television they are trying to predict before the finale.

That is one of the most disturbing parts of true-crime culture online: crime is no longer just being reported. It is being consumed as content.

That is why a headline like The Delphi Murder Trial Is TikTok’s Latest Fixation matters. Even the framing tells the story. Rolling Stone described the Delphi case as the latest object of TikTok obsession, showing how major criminal cases increasingly become part of the social media content cycle rather than remaining solely matters of reporting, evidence and due process.

When did public interest become public performance?

Because that is what much of this really is. People are not just sharing information. They are performing intelligence. They want to look observant, insightful and ahead of everyone else. Social media has created an environment where being seen as the person who “figured it out” matters more than being accurate. And in true crime, that mindset is dangerous.

It is also dangerous because misinformation does not just distort public conversation. Research suggests it can distort memory too. A study in Frontiers in Psychology found that online misinformation can alter witnesses’ recollections, while related research indexed in PMC found that self-directed web sleuthing reduced eyewitness identification accuracy. In other words, online speculation is not always just noise around a case. It can interfere with how people remember what they saw.

That matters because many people turn to online sleuthing out of distrust. They do not fully trust police, media institutions or the pace of formal investigations. Sometimes that distrust is understandable. Institutions fail. Cases are mishandled. Victims are ignored. But replacing those failures with viral speculation is not a solution. A flawed justice system does not get better because millions of strangers with smartphones start acting like detectives.

If anything, it gets noisier, crueler and less grounded in fact.

And maybe that is what bothers me most. Real crime is messy, painful and human. Real victims are not plot devices. Their families are not side characters in an internet mystery. Witnesses are not puzzle pieces for TikTok users to arrange for entertainment. These are real people living through some of the worst moments of their lives while strangers online debate them like fictional suspects.

Crime is not fandom. It should not be treated like one.

Social media has convinced people that attention is the same thing as expertise, and it is not. Watching documentaries, following updates and consuming true-crime content does not make someone qualified to publicly accuse others or build theories out of incomplete facts. It makes them an audience member.

And audiences need to remember their limits.

The internet can be a powerful tool for awareness. It can spread information quickly and keep important stories from fading. But when awareness turns into amateur detective work, the line between helping and harming disappears fast. Justice is not served by rumor. Truth is not uncovered through viral guesses. And public curiosity, no matter how intense, is not the same thing as evidence.

Social media did not just change how we follow crime. It changed how people see themselves in relation to it. Too many now see themselves not as observers, but as investigators; not as consumers, but as participants. That might feel empowering, but it comes with real consequences for real people.

Everyone wants to be the one who solves the mystery.

Almost nobody wants to admit what happens when they are wrong.