Keyboard warriors are coming for your marriage

Social media sleuthing is all the rage, from royal troubles to celebrity cheating scandals. More recently, the internet's army of investigators has a new target... regular people. Rachel Richardson asks if exposing affairs online is fair game 

Social media sleuths who wildly speculate on the state of royal marriages have been hard to avoid in recent weeks. Many of them have gone viral, racking up millions of views on TikTok

and Twitter/X, after cooking up all kinds of stories about infidelity and marriages on the rocks, often offering outlandish “evidence” to back up their claims.

The armchair detectives base their theories on a small detail in a photograph, an outfit choice or by cobbling together a timeline. The more unhinged the theory the more their videos seem to attract an audience. But it’s not just the well known who are subject to their conspiratorial eagle-eyes. The internet’s army of investigators has a new target… regular people.

This month alone, two alleged “cheats” have gone viral on TikTok after sleuths exposed their names and, in one case, published covertly shot photographs of them. The first was sparked by fitness creator Tiana Wiltshire after she posted a video to TikTok asking for help to find a woman she believed had been cheated on. She said: “If your fiance just went on his bachelor trip to Las Vegas and was at the MGM Wet Republic pool yesterday, Sunday 9 March, he cheated on you.”

Wiltshire went on to say, “his name rhymes with Cat Saddams”, and asked for the “wronged” fiancee to reach out to her. As views for her video notched up, so did the comments from viewers who decided that the alleged cheater was called “Matt Adams”. Other self-appointed detectives found wedding websites and registries on Amazon and The Knot under that name. Commenters tagged women, including Shaylee Stovall, who is engaged to a Matt Adams, but not the one who had been partying in Vegas.