The question of whether a survivor is believed no longer begins in court. By the time a case reaches trial, many of the assumptions about credibility have already been formed online.

Social media has created a new monster space where allegations of violence are discussed, interpreted, and judged in real time. Content creators analyse testimony, react to alleged evidence, and invite audiences to draw their own conclusions about who appears trustworthy.

Increasingly, these discussions take place long before legal proceedings have concluded.

This matters because credibility is not simply a matter of fact. It’s a construct, meaning a social judgement shaped by wider ideas about victimhood, gender, and legitimacy. Read through a critical criminological perspective, this is not a story about individual creators behaving badly. It is a lived experience about who holds the power to define truth, and how that power has shifted onto platforms with no safeguarding obligations to the people whose cases they discuss.

The Problem of the Ideal Victim

For decades, criminologists have shown that some victims are considered more believable than others. Nils Christie’s concept of the “ideal victim” remains one of the most influential explanations for why. 

The ideal victim is innocent, vulnerable, and immediately recognisable as harmed. They report quickly, resist clearly, and behave in ways that fit public expectations of victimhood. The closer someone comes to this image, the more likely they are to be believed.

The difficulty is that real human experiences of violence rarely conform to such expectations.

Victims and survivors may know the person who harmed them. They may delay reporting as children are involved and have to remain in contact with an offender, or struggle to describe traumatic events in a straightforward way. We understand that it takes years to find the words to explain what actually happened in some cases. These realities often sit uneasily alongside public assumptions about what a genuine victim should look like, especially when comparing to AI contexts and constructs.

The result is what critical criminologists have long identified: credibility is not distributed equally. It is influenced by social expectations that privilege some experiences while casting doubt on others.

What Jury Research Reveals

Research by Louise Ellison and Vanessa Munro demonstrates how these assumptions can shape decision-making within the criminal justice process.

Their mock jury studies found that behaviour commonly associated with trauma is frequently interpreted as evidence of dishonesty. Delayed reporting, emotional restraint, gaps in memory, and continued contact with an alleged offender can all become sources of suspicion, despite being well documented trauma responses rather than markers of dishonesty. Nobody really takes into consideration the volume of overwhelm during disclosure, statements and then trial. Judith Herman’s clinical work on trauma and recovery, and Bessel van der Kolk’s research on how trauma is stored in the body, both offer the clinical explanation that jurors are rarely given, that fragmented recall, delayed disclosure, and outward calm are consistent with having experienced serious harm, not evidence against it.

Importantly, these perceptions often make sense to the people holding them. Jurors do not necessarily set out to reject victims. Rather, they draw upon widely shared cultural narratives about how victims are expected to behave for decades ago, not how society is working now.

The courtroom, in other words, does not exist separately from society. It does reflect many colonial ideologies of the assumptions already circulating beyond it.

Content Creators and the Production of Credibility

Social media has made these (opinionated) credibility judgement’s more visible than ever before.

High-profile cases attract extensive commentary from creators who examine testimony, analyse body language, revisit evidence, and speculate about motivation. Audiences are encouraged to participate, weighing credibility for themselves through comments, reactions, and online discussion.

Research examining public commentary during recent high-profile trials, including work by Karen Boyle on the reaction to the Depp v Heard case, has found that this kind of content applies the same credibility heuristics identified in mock jury studies, close reading of demeanour and tone standing in for proof, and that measurable shifts in rape myth acceptance followed among audiences who consumed it. Viewed through a critical criminological perspective, the significance of this content lies not in the behaviour of individual creators but in the role they play within a broader process. They have become influential participants in the social production of credibility.

Questions that once emerged primarily within police interviews, news reports, or jury deliberations are now publicly debated before millions of viewers. Credibility is no longer negotiated solely within formal institutions. It is increasingly shaped within digital culture.

The Performance of Neutrality

Many creators present their content as objective.

Phrases such as “I’m just asking questions” or “Let’s look at the evidence” suggest an impartial search for truth. Yet neutrality is often more complicated than it first appears.

The questions people choose to ask matter. Attention is frequently directed towards a complainant’s behaviour, emotions, appearance, or decisions following the alleged abuse. These discussions can appear balanced while still relying upon assumptions deeply rooted in traditional ideas about victimhood.

What emerges is not always a neutral assessment of evidence but the repeated abusive application of informal credibility tests. This pattern has a documented history outside social media too. Joan Meier’s research on family court proceedings has tracked how framings of mutual abuse and parental alienation, presented as balanced consideration of both sides, have been used to undermine credible allegations and have measurably worsened outcomes for protective mothers. Content creators did not invent this script, but they have removed the expert gatekeeping that once slowed its spread.

The problem is not that people ask questions. The problem is that certain questions are asked far more often than others.

Platforms, Power, and the Credibility Discount

Critical criminology encourages us to look beyond individuals and towards structures.

Social media platforms are designed around visibility, engagement, and attention. Content that generates certainty, conflict, and emotional investment often receives greater reach than content that emphasises complexity or uncertainty.

These incentives interact with what Deborah Tuerkheimer describes as the “credibility discount”: the tendency for allegations of abuse to be treated with heightened scepticism and demands for additional proof.

Social media did not create this pattern. Long before the rise of digital platforms, victims of gendered violence encountered disbelief, suspicion, and scrutiny. What social media has done is accelerate the speed and scale at which these narratives travel.

An assumption that might once have circulated within a small social network can now reach millions within hours, and it earns the creator money.

When Commentary Becomes Interference

There is a further dimension to this that sits closer to law than to culture, and it deserves to be named directly rather than treated only as a matter of tone or ethics.

In England and Wales, the Contempt of Court Act 1981 exists precisely because public commentary on an active case can prejudice proceedings, influence a juror’s reasoning, or place pressure on a witness or complainant before they have given evidence. The strict liability rule applies once proceedings are active, regardless of whether the person commenting intended harm. Historically this framework was built around newspapers and broadcasters, institutions with editorial oversight and legal teams reviewing copy before publication.

Content creators covering live or recent cases largely sit outside that oversight structure, yet the effect of their commentary on a complainant, a juror pool, or a case’s integrity can be just as significant, arguably more so given the reach and speed involved. When a creator speculates about a complainant’s honesty, revisits evidence still under reporting restrictions, or encourages an audience to treat a live case as entertainment to be judged in the comments section, this is no longer simply an exercise of free expression. It begins to resemble interference with a live legal process, whether or not it is prosecuted as such.

From a safeguarding perspective, this matters directly. A survivor navigating an already difficult legal process should not also be navigating a parallel, unregulated trial conducted by strangers online, one with no burden of proof, no disclosure rules, and no accountability if it gets the facts wrong or discourages other survivors from coming forward. Advocacy for survivor protection has to extend into this space, not stop at the courtroom door.

There is a reasonable counterargument here, and it is worth touching upon rather than dismissing. Broad restrictions on commentary about ongoing cases risk chilling legitimate public interest journalism and survivor-led advocacy that has, at times, exposed failures the formal system missed. Any move toward holding creators accountable needs to distinguish between commentary that informs and commentary that actively undermines a fair process, rather than suppressing scrutiny of the justice system altogether. That distinction is difficult to draw in practice, but it is the distinction that matters.

What can be said with more confidence is this: platforms and creators currently operate with far less accountability for this kind of interference than traditional media ever did, at a moment when their reach and influence over public belief has never been greater. Closing that gap, through clearer application of existing contempt law, platform-level responsibility, and safeguarding-informed content moderation, is a proportionate response to a genuine and growing harm, not an attack on legitimate speech.

Beyond Individual Cases

The implications extend beyond any single trial or controversy.

Debates surrounding propensity evidence reveal a similar tension. David Lisak’s research on repeat and largely undetected offending has been used by feminist legal academics to argue that patterns of behaviour are particularly relevant in cases involving sexual violence, since this kind of offending tends to be repeated rather than isolated. Yet reliance on pattern evidence can carry its own costs. Jennifer Temkin and Carol Smart have separately raised concerns that leaning on multiple complainants as a route to credibility concedes something significant, that a single account was not considered sufficient in the first place.

If multiple complainants are required before allegations are considered credible, the underlying assumption remains unchanged: one person’s account may not be enough.

The issue, therefore, is larger than questions of evidence law. It concerns the social conditions under which credibility is granted in the first place.

Looking Beyond the Courtroom

The influence of content creators should not be understood as a wholly new problem. It is better understood as a contemporary expression of a much older one.

Social media has become a powerful site where ideas about victimhood, truthfulness, and credibility are produced and circulated. Content creators now play a significant (economic) role in shaping those discussions regardless of the harm they cause as they often reach audiences that far exceed the number of people who will ever enter a courtroom.

I will close with this…

Too much attention is spent analysing the behaviour of victims and survivors and not enough examining the standards used to judge them, and not enough examining the accountability of those doing the judging. If victims and survivors are to be meaningfully supported, greater attention must be paid to the assumptions, narratives, and credibility tests that continue to shape public belief long before a case reaches trial, and to holding accountable those whose commentary tips over into interference with the process itself.