The business model of lies, gossip and misinformation about Jack and Lilly Sullivan on social media

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TikTokers declaring Jack and Lilly Sullivan have been found.

True-crime YouTubers harvesting local news footage, overdubbing it with commentary and declaring their discovery of “huge” and “disturbing” clues.

An AI-generated account of the children’s murder told in story form being-shared on Facebook as the “most plausible scenario.”

Our shared horror at the disappearance of two children from Lansdowne Station, Pictou County, is being turned into something ugly on social media – profit and obsession.

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“The way monetization works is it doesn’t matter if the content is accurate, it just matters that it’s popular,” said Suzie Dunn, director of the Law and Technology Institute at Dalhousie University’s Schulich School of Law.

“So every time somebody views that content, if it’s attached to a monetized account, it increases the ability of the user or company to bring in monetization dollars through advertising.”

This monetization of obsession for information about what happened to Jack and Lilly fills the vacuum of a truth that’s hard to accept: We may have to wait weeks or years with no guarantee answers will come at all.

After five days of scouring the woods by hundreds of search and rescue volunteers, K-9 teams, helicopters and drones, the children weren’t found.
Step father Daniel Martell told PostMedia he believes the two children wandered out the sliding door of their rural home on the morning of May 2 while he and their mother, Malehya Brooks-Murray, lay in the bedroom with their baby.

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A police investigation involving Northeast Nova Major Crime has been working on the case since the day after the children went missing.

“We’re exploring all avenues in this missing persons investigation,” said Staff Sgt. Curtis MacKinnon of the Pictou County District RCMP in a written statement released Tuesday.

“We have officers from multiple disciplines dedicated to finding Lilly and Jack, including highly trained RCMP major crime and forensic investigators.”

MacKinnon said they are following up on 180 tips from the public and have identified 35 people for formal interviews, including community members and those closest to the children.

A two-day operation by the RCMP’s underwater recovery team did not find the children in lakes or ponds around Lansdowne Station.

“We continue to work day and night on this file,” said MacKinnon. “Like all Nova Scotians, we want answers and we want to know what happened to these children.”

The waiting is made harder by social media algorithms that learn our interests and feed us more content that keeps us staring at our screens. And there is little-to-no accountability for whether that content is either true or contributing to the public good.

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There’s actually an economic incentive, warns Schulich School of Law professor Michael Karanicolas, for  “content creators” to fill the lack of information with misinformation and for the platforms to let it happen, a business model that has benefited from artificial intelligence.

“AI can churn out large volumes of content in relatively fluid English with minimal oversight,” said Karanicolas.

“If it costs a few pennies to make and it makes a few pennies more in advertising revenue, that’s a viable business model.”

Whether it’s true or not, and whether it’s made by actual people or not, when we click on links or follow social media commentary, we’re seeing advertisements, spending more time on social media platforms and feeding the machine.

And it’s damaging to our mental health, warns psychologist Simon Sherry.

“You now have sophisticated algorithms monitizing your attention; some of the smartest people in the world are targeting your attention by making you feel anxious or outraged,” said Sherry.

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“So we see people with excessive involvement with screens, especially social media and a host of negative consequences.”

Those consequences include increased anxiety, inattention and depression that can filter into other facets of our lives.

But we’re not passive victims in this, cautions Sherry. By engaging in obsessive social media discussions, we can become content creators who don’t profit financially and suffer harm ourselves while harming others.

“I doubt the grieving is facilitating by learning every microspic detail of this tragedy; instead, what we see online is people more or less leering at human misery,” said Sherry.

“This is in no way unique to 2025. Whether poetry, novels or other forms, for a very long time we have gawked at the dark side of humanity. I think this is the most recent manifestation of it.”

However the disappearance of Jack and Lilly Sullivan is or isn’t resolved, it won’t be the last case of social media’s unhealthy relationship to tragedy.

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It’s getting worse, not better.

“The people who run these social media companies are among the wealthiest in the world,” said Dunn.

“We should want social media companies to invest in content moderation to make sure their products add to the social good, not just add to social harm. They are not incentivised to moderate this type of content, so without regulations that would give financial penalties, why would they bother?”

Both Dunn and Karanicolas said social media companies have moved away from moderating their content for what’s true and what’s harmful in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic.

During a 2020 interview with Fox News, Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg said, “I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online. I think in general, private companies probably shouldn’t be — especially these platform companies — shouldn’t be in the position of doing that.”

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Are social media companies the postman or the publisher?

The postman isn’t responsible for what’s written on the letters they deliver. The publisher of, say, a newspaper, can be sued for publishing defamatory and harmful information.

Karanicolas cautions that that question is based upon 20th century technology – when the news cycle was slow enough and the participants in it could be held accountable.

Can a family member of Jack and Lilly Sullivan find and sue content creators, who often exist half a world away, for defamation?

Holding the platforms liable for the content posted on them by individuals could also have negative consequences for public discourse.

“The first thing we’d see is a flood of lawsuits; pick your hostile billionaire who doesn’t like criticism, they will start suing the platforms and platforms will take down rather than fight the lawsuits,” said Karanicolas.

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“You can talk about Meta and X as bad actors, but (making them liable for posts) will make it functionally impossible for competitors like Mastodon and Bluesky to rise up and compete. It will entrench the dominant position of platforms by making it much more expensive to run a platform.”

Cautioning that regulation of social media companies demanding content moderation is a slippery slope capable of being abused by governments, Karanicolas said that, if well drafted, it has the potential to help.

In the meantime, Jack and Lilly are still missing.

The torment over their loss isn’t going away.

And neither is social media.

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