The Jay Slater case attracted the most “vitriolic and hateful comments” from amateur sleuths and such online behaviour needs to be stopped, says the head of a charity helping his family.
Matthew Searle, the chief executive of LBT Global, has told Sky News his organisation is planning to talk to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper in the coming weeks about how to tackle the “damaging and traumatising” conduct.
He said the comments were the worst he had seen in more than 20 years in the job.
The British overseas missing persons charity started helping Mr Slater‘s family about 12 days into his disappearance, including dealing with the “huge amount of armchair detectives, so-called experts and the vile comments”, with speculation rife online about what happened to him.
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The teenager’s remains were found by rescue workers in Tenerife on Monday, about a month after he went missing on 17 June on the Spanish island as he embarked on an 11-hour walk back to his accommodation following a night out.
The 19-year-old’s multiple injuries were consistent with an accidental fall in a rocky area, a court confirmed.
Only on Sunday, Mr Slater’s mum Debbie Duncan felt compelled to speak of “awful comments and theories filling social media”.
Within days of his disappearance, a number of Facebook groups dedicated to the case had been set up – with some going on to attract hundreds of thousands of members.
Many members of the groups used them to engage in serious discussion about the teenager’s possible fate, or simply to express sympathy for him, his family and his friends.
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However, the story also prompted a succession of wild theories, often based on unsubstantiated rumour, fabricated screenshots of online messages from people connected to the case and, in some cases, faked videos purporting to show Mr Slater or what happened to him.
Speaking to Sky’s Matt Barbet on the UK Tonight, Mr Searle said what people saw online when they looked up the case was “vile stuff that’s utterly baseless almost 100% of the time”.
And it took practitioners like him a “huge amount of time” to try to “get rid of it”.
He said in the past week his charity had received hundreds of emails from people claiming they knew where Mr Slater was – “leads” which he and others had to follow up.
“Ultimately it hinders the search and it’s terrifyingly horrible for a family that are going through this,” Mr Searle added.
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He also warned that in the age of social media, “wherever there’s a real-life crime drama acting out in front of our eyes on television, half the population need to jump on Facebook, set up a Facebook group… to tell the world what really happened”.
“This just goes on and on and it gets a huge amount of traction, and it’s really worrying to the point where our charity thinks it’s time that it has to stop.”
Read more:
How Jay Slater was found after ’29 days of constant search’
Local says ‘it’s hard to understand how he got there’
‘You should be ashamed’: Anger in Jay Slater groups
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Mr Searle said his charity is now looking at bringing Mr Slater’s body home, “dealing with the massive paperwork, translations and logistics… and making what is just the worst time for them [the family] as easy as possible”.
Meanwhile, the teenager’s mother has paid tribute to her “beautiful boy”.
In a statement, Ms Duncan – who flew to Tenerife to search for him – said: “I just can’t believe this could happen to my beautiful boy. Our hearts are broken.”
