Gabby Petito is the first missing persons case of the 21st century - Hear me out.

Gabby Petito’s hashtag on TikTok has 963 million views.
Brian Laundrie has 516 million.
Gabby’s Instagram account is now at 1.1 million followers, up from almost nothing.
Brian Laundrie on Instagram went from nothing to 378,000 followers.

The average video length on TikTok is about 30 seconds, meaning 1.2 billion minutes/20 million hours of views for people getting news on the topic there.

Gabby Petito went missing on September 11th and on the 23rd, her Instagram hit a million followers. Comparing that, Harry Potter Rupert Grint broke a million Instagram followers in 4 hours and 1 minute setting the record until South Korean singer Taeil Moon did it in an hour and forty five.

The reason I’m bringing this up is I believe Gabby Petito in away is the first missing persons case of the 21st century.

The first case most people would name is Natalee Holloway in 2005, but the method it was reported and gained traction was largely traditional media, with magazines, TV & a bit of the internet.

Gabby Petito is an unusual case, where she is a missing person with an active social media, who lived a pretty normal life. Her likely killer being her fiancé Brian Laundrie was also pretty active.

543,000 people were reported missing in 2020.
93% are found in the first month.
99.8% of cases for people under 18 are found.
90% of those not found are believed to have intentionally left.

A lot of people have discussed what about this particular case, versus the more than half a million a year which are ignored.

Joy Reid on MSNBC made a pretty overreaching statement labeling it as “missing white woman syndrome”, largely due to the truth most missing person cases are of people who are minorities and talked about less.

My reason for why this case has taken so much attention is that it’s the first criminal case where a victim and a suspect both had an active social media presence.

The vast majority of criminal cases happen with people not on social media at all, let alone a person posting photos/videos a few times a month for years. It’s something which allows to give people a timeline, where they can go through literally hundreds of images and create a story.

It allowed people to create a different vessel for following a news story like this, which is comparable to when the first criminal cases happened with photos in the paper, people talking about it on the radio, people talking about it on TV or people posting it on a blog.

It seems like a lot of people are questioning why this case is being talked about as much as they are talking about the actual case itself. I really see this as just a taste of how future criminal cases like this go, where someone goes missing, dies or does something and the whole world is going to judge things by a handful of photos online and some videos.