If You Have Mixed Feelings On Lindsay Clancy’s Guilt, Get Off TikTok

Twice now I’ve seen it happen: A person I know and whose sanity I’d otherwise never question expresses an opinion about a high-profile criminal trial completely at odds with reality. And the cause both times this happened was the same: The individual was following the case almost exclusively by looking at TikTok.

The Lindsay Clancy trial, with the jury having been instructed Tuesday to continue deliberating after failing to reach a verdict in four days, isn’t something I’ve been following from the start. But when I first heard about it on cable news, I knew the most important facts immediately: that three young children had been brutally strangled to death; that the mother, Lindsay Clancy, didn’t deny she killed them; and that Clancy attempted to commit suicide after the strangulations.

I sent a text to a girl friend to ask whether she had been following the trial — we’re both interested in true crime stories — and she told me she’s been “sucked in.” But then she confused me. “I don’t think she did it,” my friend said of Clancy.

In the event I was mistaken, I asked my friend if it wasn’t true that Clancy’s legal defense team wasn’t even denying she killed the kids, but was only claiming she suffered from mental illness. My friend said she didn’t believe that was the case. She was, of course, wrong. The defense team was in fact not disputing whether Clancy choked the kids to death using rubber exercise bands.

I told my friend that I hadn’t been following too closely and had only seen a small segment about it on CNN. She replied that she was tracing the details on TikTok, that “new things are coming to light” and “the timeline [of the night of the incident] just doesn’t add up.” She suggested the defense was actually targeting Clancy’s husband as the culprit.

I searched around to find more information about the case from news sources I generally trust to at least get basic details about a murder right (so long as the suspect is white) and found nothing to make me doubt what I had already learned — again, that Clancy didn’t deny killing her kids and that no one else was a suspect.

It turned out that TikTok was full of women posting views similar to those of my friend: women saying it was the husband or otherwise theorizing that the evidence proves it couldn’t have possibly been Clancy. I had seen this happen before. Back in 2023, another high-profile case, the murder trial of Alex Murdaugh, was also a TikTok sensation, with users offering their own alternative theories and conclusions as to whether Murdaugh, an influential South Carolina lawyer, had killed his wife and son.

I had been following a live stream of the trial online, and though Murdaugh denied he was guilty, he did the one thing you can never do if you’re trying to get away with murder: He admitted to having lied about where he was at the time of crime. And that confession was only after he had told authorities, friends, and family that lie, only to end up at trial, where he was confronted with irrefutable evidence that he was in fact not telling the truth. Only then did he give it up, though he still said he didn’t kill anyone. (Murdaugh was convicted of murder, though he has since had the verdict overturned on appeal and is now awaiting a retrial.)

After having seen that on the live stream, I asked someone close to me whether she had been following along. She said she had not been following closely but that a friend of hers had been tracing information about the case on TikTok and that he was not convinced that Murdaugh was guilty. When I told her about the revelation at the actual trial, she said she wasn’t aware of it.

No one should deny that this is a problem. When otherwise rational people are seduced by TikTok posters into fantasy scenarios about an obvious criminal being framed, to the extent that even a woman who admits she killed her children is now viewed as the victim, there’s a crisis at hand.

As a true crime junkie, I know there are mysterious deaths, unsolved murders, and even mind-altering plot twists that have taken place in real life. Those happen. But those aren’t reasons to reject reality in a thrill-seeking social media adventure that abandons the facts at hand. In the Clancy case, that includes three dead children and a mother who admits she’s their killer.

If TikTok is what’s causing people to end up not just wrong about real crimes taking place, but to flat-out side with killers, those people cannot be trusted to look at TikTok. Their brains aren’t compatible with it, and their phones should be taken away forever.