“Part of Nicola Bulley’s sisters interview,” tweets Lost Butterfly 28, clearly her or his real name. “She is now living with Paul & the children presumably to care for the kids. Something just doesn’t sit right with hers or Paul’s interviews. So different to the dad who genuinely sound worried and distressed. Weird.” Lorna McCrossan tweets another theory: “I hope that caravan park beyond the gate is being turned upside down …” There’s plenty more of this kind of stuff on social media about the disappearance of Nicola Bulley if you want to look for it, which I found myself doing because I wanted to see for myself how twisted people can be. And the answer is very twisted. Amateur detectives, conspiracy theorists, general loons and of course anyone who hates the police – they all know the answers, except of course none of them do. She’s a real person, a mother of two children. Has the rush to social media twisted some minds so desperately out of shape?
Note that I said I had to go out of my way to read this madness on social media. That’s because I tend to ignore the haters. If this means I live in a social media echo chamber, then so be it. I am not interested in any of this gossip from, certainly on twitter, anonymous sources, bots and trolls, essentially. I am paying attention to the case because it’s very worrying and sad. It is not for me to have opinions on what has happened because they would be based on pure guesswork. And I am nowhere near the facts, whatever they turn out to be. My concern is that there are lots of people who know equally as little as I do, but have either made up their minds or made up stories about what may have happened.
Ms Bulley’s friends have been on social media, expressing concern and disgust about what they are finding on social media. Well, my advice would be this: don’t look at social media, but if you feel you need to, then limit who can see your accounts and the accounts you see of other people. I can avoid most of the crap if I want to and I usually do.
Sooner or later, we will find out what has happened and whether there will be a happy ending, of sorts. We know that incidents like these rarely end happily but why should the family not have hope when there is no evidence that we know of to render that hope useless. Maybe the police shouldn’t have speculated that Ms Bulley probably fell in the river, but honestly I don’t know how these things work. Either way, this whole business is horrible and I do wish the ghouls on social media get back in the real world soon.
