Marianna Spring goes to visits St Michael's on Wyre to try to understand the scale of the social media frenzy.
I am walking the same route that Nicola Bulley, 45, followed before she disappeared, along the river in the small Lancashire village of Saint Michael's on Wyre. It's also the same route that amateur social media sleuths take when they come to look into the case themselves.
This drastic spiralling of speculation and conspiracy theories has triggered statements from Nicola's family, and the police who issued a dispersal order. Stevie agrees. He wants to know about "different scenarios and what people think". In his view interest in the case is still picking up steam on social media, rather than waning.
As of Friday 17 February, when I checked TikTok, videos discussing Nicola Bulley's case since she first disappeared and using her name as a hashtag have accumulated more than 270 million views. In comparison, posts and videos using these same phrases on other major social media sites have had less traction.
TikTok videos I found suggesting Nicola Bulley's friends and family could be "crisis actors" staging events, questioning whether Nicola is real and alleging the case has been created as a "distraction" by the government have accumulated more than 1.5 million views. "Some of the things they point out in the videos make you think maybe they are onto something," she says.
"Being a mum myself I think it's nice to see people sharing hoping it might just trigger someone to come forward," she tells me. It says it "does not tolerate bullying or harassment on TikTok and we remove content that violates our policies". It also revealed it is "deploying additional resources to reduce the potential spread of conspiratorial content about unfolding events by making it ineligible for recommendation to the For You feed".A local dog walker, who doesn't want to be named over fears of backlash online, says he was outraged when he watched Duffy's livestream.
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