Social media, hashtags and the search for Corrie Mckeague

Desperate for answers after the disappearance of her son, Nicola Urquhart went online and set up a Find Corrie Facebook page - little did she know how big it would become.

RAF gunner Corrie Mckeague, 23, went missing on 24 September 2016, after wandering the streets of Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, having been separated from his friends following a night of drinking.

The mystery surrounding his disappearance became a source of fascination, speculation and crowd-sourced detective work to online supporters who called themselves "Corrie's Army". The #FindCorrie hashtag frequently trended on Twitter and Nicola's Facebook page grew to 120,000 followers.

Ten years on, did social media help or hinder the search for Corrie?

The airman, who became a dad to daughter Ellie nine months after his disappearance, was officially declared dead in 2022, but his body has never been found.

After years of searching an inquest ruled he had died after climbing into a Biffa bin before it was tipped into a waste lorry.

Nicola, a former police sergeant, came to accept the ruling and eventually said the Suffolk Police had "got it right", after previously being critical of its handling of the investigation.

When she felt the force was not listening to her or taking her theories and suggestions seriously, she took to social media to put pressure on officers.

One Facebook post, next to a photograph of Nicola searching through woodland, was shared almost 270,000 times around the globe.

"We wouldn't have had the investigation we did without the support we had from local people and over 100,000 people giving me a loud voice," Nicola told the BBC.

"I would write a post on Facebook and the public would then get right behind it - there was a direct correlation between social media and the local people and [action].

"It probably made it very difficult for the police, but for us social media was fantastic, had a massive impact and it was so good for me as someone searching for their son."

In recent years, social media has become a common feature in high-profile cases of a missing people - notably the disappearance of 45-year-old Nicola Bulley in Lancashire in 2023.

In that case, police warned people against harmful speculation and "online abuse". There were also fears the search area had become a tourist spot because of the social media profile.

The nature of social media has also grown and evolved. When Corrie disappeared Twitter had not yet been rebranded a X.

The platform that would eventually become TikTok – initially named Douyin - launched in China on 20 September 2016, four days before he went missing. Today the platform said it is used by more than 30 million people in the UK.

Facebook has about 58.5 million users in this country. Would this have changed anything in Corrie's case?

"It's difficult to answer because if it had happened 10 years later, Corrie would've been TikTok famous, without a shadow of a doubt," said Nicola.

"Not because he went missing, because he would have still been here and he would have just been TikTok famous – the world would've already have known Corrie.

"If we had all of the social media we have today, would it have been different? I don't know, because as a family we would've still behaved the same way."

While Nicola quickly became well-versed in utilising social media, she believes in 2016 the police were still "catching up" with how useful it could be to investigations.

She accused the force of issuing appeals for information on social platforms, but failing to respond to the public.

"They didn't expect the volume of calls to come in that did and people said they'd been in touch with social media at the police, but they were not answering," she said.

"So, it was a learning curve for them and they've had to adapt to social media and the impact it can have."

Suffolk Police said its thoughts were with Corrie's family and friends. It has closed the inquiry and said it would only reopen it if any "new, realistic and credible information becomes available".

Guidance published in February by the College of Policing said if a force does not have the capability to monitor social media responses 24-hours a day, it should record the risk of not doing so.

Forces should also have processes in place to manage surges in social media traffic.

After her son's disappearance, Nicola, who lives in Scotland, said she would be regularly contacted by other parents and families across the country asking for help to find their missing relatives.

For while, she obliged and did all she could to support them, again using social media to, in her view, force action.

On one occasion, she said she helped a family who wanted support with a search on Facebook to find a loved one.

"That's exactly what they did, and they found him. It didn't make me feel good because somebody died, but it made me feel relieved that they'd found him," she said.

But what could be the downsides of using social media to help search for a missing loved one?

According to a study by University College London, 68.5% of the 44,935 UK adults surveyed said they had experienced some kind of online abuse.

Nicola said her family's experience of using social media was "overwhelmingly positive", but there had also been some "truly horrific" moments and fabricated tip-offs.

"We had people phoning [the missing persons number], putting posts or leaving messages on my phone saying, 'Corrie is in my attic, I've got him tied up'," she said.

"We knew that was ridiculous and wasn't real, so some of the things we laughed about with dark humour because they were so ridiculous. But other things did hurt."

Matt Navara, a social media consultant, said online platforms can be a powerful way for families looking for a loved one to put a face in front of thousands of people and keep an appeal alive when news coverage might have moved on.

Yet, he added, it can also lead people to analyse footage without any context or turn up at a location because they have seen it in a video.

On 16 September, Corrie would have celebrated his 33rd birthday.

Nicola described him as being "so unforgettable" – something that, if the ongoing engagement on the Find Corrie Facebook page is anything to go by, has proved true.

"Generally, after about six months of somebody dying, people don't want to talk about that person because they don't want to make the person feel bad or sad," she added.

"But 10 years on, people we've never met are still asking how we are and talking to me about my son."

Additional reporting by Cleah Hetherington and Wayne Bavin

Do you have a story suggestion for Suffolk? Contact us below.

Follow Suffolk news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.