True Crime Channels onYouTube: Informative or Exploitative?
2024 a girl from central Florida disappeared on her 13th birthday, her name was Madeline Soto. This was also the same day I discovered true crime channels on YouTube, for better or for worse, let´s get into it and my conflicted feelings about these channels. I have friends in Florida which made me aware of this case early on, actually the same few days she was gone. I started to search for it online and the only ones that covered the case were true crime channels on YouTube. I found not only one or two channels but several that covered the Madeline Soto case in great detail.
I quickly realized what a money-making business this all was, covering different types of horrible crimes where these channels pay huge amounts of money for court documents, police recordings and interrogations etc, all you can imagine, and then these true crime channels do content on it, showing you in hour-long videos or more, sometimes LIVE shows where people can give them superthanks (money) and join their members-only video memberships, give them money on PayPal, merch, Patreon and Buy Me a Coffee etc.
It’s a very complex feeling for me since I did watch many videos about this particular case… at the same time it felt like the channel hosts used it as entertainment and their bread and butter without any formal education in crime. I will give you a concrete example, I watched “Grizzly True Crime” on YouTube back then, the name of the host is Gisela K and she has almost 500,000 followers. She followed this case very closely and actively also did snark on the suspects who she found repulsive.
I understand that you want to talk badly about the people that do all kinds of terrible harm to others, especially when the victime are minors, but snarking and making remarks as entertainment for your audience when people lost their lives and you actually don´t know the full history of it and never will…I felt it´s just wrong and too sad overall, not as snarky entertainment.
I started to get annoyed by her behaviour but found out that she also was a repeated guest on Court TV (American digital broadcast television network and former pay-television channel, originally launched in 1991) talking about the Madeline case which made me feel even worse since Court TV seems to be a well-established broadcast for many years but they chose her as an “expert” in this murder case. Why? I started to feel that if they think she has any expertise in this, she is after all a retired pilot, not a crime investigator or anything that has to do with crimes at all, then can you trust anything at all they put out there? I guess not. She also been a guest on other shows talking about not only this crime case but others as well, but where is her education in this I wonder? There is none besides being a pilot.
I guess we all can just read a lot of crime stuff/see a lot of crime stuff and then post it on YouTube and claim we know a lot? Gisela also deleted constructive feedback on her channel repeated times which made it seem she is not that transparent either for those who don´t agree with her, creating the famous YouTube channel echo chamber that many creators prefer.
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Some of Grizzly’s followers say in the comment section on her YouTube channel that they can only watch Grizzly True Crime because she makes it “lighter to watch and not so serious”. I think these people need to understand that if you need snark and humor to watch true crime because it’s too dark and depressing without it… this is not for you and never will be. Crimes and particularly murders are serious and should not be about making fun of anyone even if the murderer is a horrible person, it´s just not the way to do it.
Another true crime channel that covered this case was Plunder True Crime, her real name is Paula Mooney. Plunder did come across as a warmer, more genuine person to me than Gisela. So I unfollowed Grizzly True crime and went to Plunder instead. Maybe she repeated and dragged out the content a bit too much back then when she covered the Madeline Soto case by first showing the video clip and then repeating what they said in the video, but she didn’t snark or make “fun” of anyone. She was more down to earth and less focused on monetizing, I did like her. She did mention that Gisela K had stolen her paid police videos to use as her own on her channel, that Plunder had to put a big watermark over all videos and do voice watermarks throughout videos as well to protect herself. Only they know the full truth to it but I wouldn´t be that surprised, if I’m honest.
My knowledge of true crime channelsin general is just as long as the case of Madeline Soto went, not super long, but not super short, just long enough to realize that most true crime channels on YouTube are usually a soggy mess of people that monetize poor victims and horrible crimes and claim it as “being on the victims’ side”, especially when they are not serious about it and like to throw in snark and sarcasm.
I feel conflicted about this whole thing because I feel there are good true crime channels out there too, for example “The Behaviour Panel” which is a channel with body language and behavioural analysis experts, but also the channel “Veroscope” which is a public demonstration of forensic linguistic intelligence analysis. Both of these, and I suspect some more, dig into cases like this in a proper and detailed way without giving the impression that it´s just business and entertainment.
At the same time, at the end of the day, they all make money off other people’s misery and tragedies, just imagine if a loved one of yours ended up as entertainment on YouTube, how would you feel when they snark and get superthanks in live shows? Horrible, right? Me too.
At the same time, I did watch a lot of those videos to find out more about the case so with my watch time I did contribute in my own way. I guess it’s all a double-edged sword, in one hand I think some of them are doing a really good job, in another way it just feels wrong in my heart.
How do you feel about this?
