From TikTok to witness list: How much can social media influence the Lindsay Clancy trial?

True-crime fandom no longer wants to watch from the sidelines; it increasingly wants in on the case.

Consider the recent lineup: TikTok helped pull the Menendez brothers back into the national conversation decades after their convictions.

Johnny Depp and Amber Heard ’s defamation trial became daily social media programming.

Luigi Mangione developed an intense internet fandom before his case even reached trial.

Increasingly, audiences aren’t satisfied with following a case.

They want to investigate it, influence it, and sometimes insert themselves into it.

Most of this activity unfolds outside the courtroom, where it shapes public opinion without becoming part of the official case.

But that boundary is now being tested in the trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother charged with murdering her three young children in Jan.

2023.

Clancy’s defense acknowledges that she killed them but argues that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and was not criminally responsible for her actions.

Online, however, some viewers have rejected both sides' accounts and begun conducting their own parallel investigation.

But it wasn’t one of their conspiracy theories that found its way into the legal proceedings.

Instead, Clancy’s attorneys became interested in a video from Emily Thorndike that has amassed over 5 million views.

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