Social media and true crime
the true crime that's worth your time
No, this isn’t a discussion thread about the various allegations of labor violations at X, the former Twitter. But it’s not completely X-free.
One thing Sarah and I have heard again and again, especially in the last few weeks, is how folks are losing touch and losing platforms as Musk’s seeming campaign to make X unusable continues. A true-crime documentarian I interviewed recently asked me if people were at Bluesky or Threads (“please don’t say Post,” they said with a grimace), saying that they’d relied on their humongous Twitter following to generate interest in their projects. And last night, an author who recently published a crime-adjacent memoir told me she was still figuring out how to interact with readers, that her Patreon helps, but that that platform — for all its value as a supporter of independent creatives — was too much of a bubble to be a Twitter replacement.
Meanwhile, most of the folks — true-crime related, and otherwise — I followed on Twitter have stopped posting; and unless I’m looking for a tweet for work, I’m never there either. This bums me out. My following wasn’t huge (1800 or so), but it was mostly folks I liked and interacted with. I don’t come even close to that anywhere else, and as I’m about to launch a new project, I’m feeling a little anxious about that, too.1
Anyway, the newsletter is on Bluesky and Instagram: bestevidencefyi. I’m evelb on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky2. Sarah is on Bluesky and Insta as sarahdbunting. (Her bookshop is exhibitbbooks across social media.) Sarah and I realized, as we discussed this thread, that most of the true crime-adjacent folks we’re interested in following are also BE subscribers, so we’re hoping that they tell us in the comments where they want to be followed, so we — and the rest of you — can add them to our feeds.
Some other accounts that we are enjoying as follows:
New York independent news site Hell Gate is hellgateny on Bluesky
The Mysterious Bookshop is active on Instagram and Threads as themysteriousbookshop
Crime Reads is on Instagram as crimereads
What about you? Where can we find you — and what true crime-related accounts do you recommend? We can’t save Twitter, but maybe we can start rebuilding some communities somewhere else. — EB
Old school internet folks, remember when we’d start a site or write a post or whatever and we’d just put it out there and hope people would find and read it? Maybe we’d email the link to some people if we were really hustling? Those were the days.
We currently have seven whole Bluesky invites available between the two of us! If you’re interested in trying out that platform and haven’t been granted access yet, send us an email at editorial@bestevidence.fyi with the subject line “Bluesky” and we’ll send out codes to join until we run out.