THE TRUTH ABOUT: Help me find interesting discoveries - The Untold Story

Nowadays, there’s pretty much nothing that you can’t find on the internet. But if you’re looking for something random or niche, you might have to know exactly where to look. And sometimes, the best place to look is the “Help Me Find” subreddit. This community has 736K weekly visitors who are eager to help strangers locate whatever they’re desperately searching for.

To keep this community running smoothly, the moderators have put some ground rules in place. First, users aren’t allowed to use the group to try to locate people, animals, or items that they actually lost. They also can’t ask for assistance in identifying medicine. There are no AI-generated answers allowed in the group, and all comments must be helpful. 

25 years ago, the idea of mobilizing the internet to help locate something as random as a stock image or a chocolate chip cookie recipe might have sounded absurd. But today, there are countless internet sleuths out there who are happy to solve even the smallest of mysteries. For years, women have joked that all they need is a first name and a photo to locate anyone on social media, a superpower often reserved for finding a cute barista that they have a crush on.

But over the last decade, internet sleuths have happily taken on much more serious cases. If you’ve seen the Netflix documentary Don't F**k With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer, you know that online groups can actually play a key role in real-life investigations. In the documentary, members of a Facebook group dedicated to finding criminal Luka Magnotta were even interviewed about their process. Of course, these random concerned citizens cannot replace law enforcement, but they can be quite helpful!

In 2021, The Guardian published a piece titled “The internet has turned us all into amateur detectives,” where Amelia Tait discussed how we all glean information about anyone from our friends to celebrities based on their social media activity. For example, I realized that a friend of mine was single when she started posting selfies on Instagram. She never did that when she was in a relationship, so that was an obvious tell, in my opinion. And while people have been discussing cold cases on the internet for decades in communities like Websleuths, getting involved in ongoing cases and conspiracy theories is still a relatively new phenomenon.  

One case of netizens becoming obsessive about a celebrity’s well-being is Britney Spears. Fans have been worried about her for years, but her cryptic posts on social media have only sparked more conversations about the pop star. 

“Fans involved in the #FreeBritney movement, for instance, have scrutinized Britney Spears’s Instagram for clues about her well-being, leading to strange dances in which posters write, ‘If you need help, wear yellow in your next video’, and then fly into a frenzy when Spears dons a yellow top,” Tait explained.

But being a detective online isn’t all fun and games. Sleuths need to be careful when they’re investigating real people, because their actions can have real-world consequences. When someone is falsely accused of a crime online, it can become nearly impossible for them to clear their name. Even if it comes out that they were innocent, a Google search of their name might include the untrue allegation for decades to come. That’s why many people prefer low-stakes investigations, such as those conducted in the “Help Me Find” subreddit.  

Now, if you want to become a bit of an internet sleuth yourself, Uncovered has a community of what they call “Citizen Detectives.” By their definition, “a Citizen Detective is a person who commits their time and knowledge to assisting in the resolution of crimes without any form of compensation or expectation of a reward.” By volunteering to do this, you’re simply agreeing to spend your free time looking into these cases. You’re doing it out of the desire to solve crimes and get justice for victims in an ethical way.