Comment Section Forensics: Everyone’s an Expert Now

Scroll through the comments on any viral court case and you’ll find a surprising number of
credentials. Someone is a “former paralegal” who just knows the defendant is lying. Someone
else “studied psychology” and can tell from a single blink that this is a textbook narcissist. A
third person doesn’t cite any expertise at all, they just watched the interrogation video eleven
times, so at this point, they basically are an expert.

This isn’t a fringe phenomenon anymore. During Lindsay Clancy’s 2026 murder trial, self
described armchair lawyers, forensic analysts, psychiatrics, and medical professionals flooded
social media with theories about the case, not all of it grounded in fact. Media researcher
Kathryn Coduto, who studies true crime, said the case has effectively become a fandom, with
viewers drawn to it the way they’d be drawn to a show with compelling characters, and noted
that once people committed to downloading the story, the platform’s algorithm noticed and kept
feeding it to them.

Three children had died. Commenters were treating it like a new season premiere.

Body language reads the same way. In courtroom footage, defendants get analyzed like tea
leaves. A smile means guilt, a blank face means guilt, too much emotions means guilt too.
When accused Charlie Kirk shooter Tyler Robinson appeared in court, a self described body
language expert flagged that Robinson smiling briefly while talking to his lawyers “wasn’t a good
look” for someone facing murder charges, and separately noted that the way Robinson and his
attorneys didn’t lean toward each other suggests they weren’t close. Whatever the defendant
does, becomes evidence for whatever people already believe.

The trouble is that “body language expert” isn’t a credential with much behind it. Researchers
Vincent Denault and Mirera Zloteanu, writing in Evolutionary Human Sciences, argue that
self-styled body language experts on social media promote unfounded, discredited claims about
reading nonverbal behavior, and that the public is fed this “analysis” of criminal defendants
instead of anything empirically supported. And by calling themselves body language experts,
the field sounds more scientific than it really is.

None of this is really about facts. It is about performance. Confidently declaring “the eyes don’t
lie” gets replies and validation. Saying “I genuinely don’t know” gets nothing. Why use credited
sources, when you can sound like the expert yourself?

Real behavioral analysis is slow, technical, and hedged constantly. It does not perform well in
the comment section. So when a case blows up online, what’s often on display isn’t collective
insight, its collective performance, dressed up as expertise. It doesn’t need to be right. It just
needs to sound sure.

But if everyone online sounds certain, does anyone actually know anything?

Works Cited

Burton, Taylor. “Rise of the Armchair Detective: The Impact of Social Media on Court Cases.”
Pennsylvania Bar Institute, 24 Sept. 2025,
www.pbi.org/blog/rise-of-the-armchair-detective-the-impact-of-social-media-on-court-cases/.

Denault, Vincent, and Mircea Zloteanu. “Darwin’s Illegitimate Children: How Body Language
Experts Undermine Darwin’s Legacy.” Evolutionary Human Sciences, vol. 4, 2022,
doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2022.50 .

“Body Language Expert Analyzes Tyler Robinson During First In-Person Court Appearance.”
KUTV, https://kutv.com/news/local/body-language-expert-analyzes-tyler-robinson-during-first-in-person-
court-appearance.

Miller, Alex, and Kathryn Coduto. “The Fierce Attention Directed at Lindsay Clancy’s Trial
Highlights Risks About Truth and Social Media.” Scripps News,
tmj4.com/us-news/crime/the-fierce-attention-directed-at-lindsay-clancys-trial-highlights-risks-abo