I watched Netflix’s three-part documentary Idaho Murders: College Nightmare, expecting another true-crime chronicle. Instead, I found a cautionary tale about the moral corrosion of the social media age.
The murders shattered the illusion of an idyllic college town where doors, friendships, and assumptions of decency had long remained open. Into that atmosphere of trust stepped a doctoral teaching assistant in criminology whose crimes seemed almost grotesquely theatrical: an aspiring expert in criminal behavior who became the very monster he purported to study. The documentary is unsettling not merely because it chronicles an act of staggering brutality, but because it reveals how quickly evil can erupt into places that imagine themselves immune from it.
Yet the documentary’s most instructive chapter unfolds after the killings, during the long months when investigators had no public suspect. That vacuum of knowledge became oxygen for the internet. Social media influencers rushed to fill the silence, speaking with the confidence of detectives while possessing none of the evidence. Their videos, podcasts, and livestreams transformed ignorance into certainty. Innocent college students—already traumatized by the murders—were publicly identified as suspects, dissected as if they were characters in a murder mystery rather than human beings whose lives could be permanently scarred by reckless speculation.
These people were not engaged in an earnest search for truth. They were engaged in a hunt for attention. Every accusation, every dramatic thumbnail, every emphatic declaration became another bid for clicks, subscribers, and algorithmic favor. Tragedy had become raw material for personal branding.
Years ago, Jaron Lanier warned that social media rewards the most primitive parts of our psychology. The platforms appeal less to our reflective minds than to our craving for recognition, outrage, and status. They encourage us to chase attention as if it were oxygen. Watching the documentary, I felt as though Lanier’s warning had escaped the pages of his book and materialized on the screen. The influencers were not simply exploiting a tragedy; they had become creatures shaped by an economy in which visibility matters more than truth and confidence is valued above evidence.
The documentary left me thinking less about the murderer than about myself. Over the last fifteen years, I have spent enough time on social media to recognize the same impulse in miniature—the subtle desire to post, comment, and share simply because an audience is there. The temptation is rarely malicious, but it springs from the same psychological soil: the hope of being noticed.
The film made me want to cultivate a new habit. Before posting, I want to pause and ask a simple question: Am I adding light, or am I merely asking strangers to look at me? That brief moment of hesitation may be the smallest possible act of resistance against an attention economy that profits from our worst instincts.
The documentary’s greatest lesson, then, has little to do with criminology. It is about character. It asks whether we will become citizens who value truth enough to remain silent when we do not know—or whether we will join the growing flock of attention vultures circling every human tragedy, mistaking spectatorship for significance. I know which path I hope to avoid. If that requires changing my relationship with social media, it is a price well worth paying.
Cinemorphosis 
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