Zara McDermott has described her new documentary is a warning on the dangers of social media and true crime.
Zara McDermott has explained the idea behind her new documentary
The 27-year-old star has worked on 'The Idaho Murders: Trial by TikTok' - which is available on BBC Three and iPlayer - looking at the 2022 murders of four students in their house at the University of Idaho, which led to a social media frenzy with so-called 'TikTok detectives' trying to solve the case at the same time as the police trying to do their jobs.
Eventually, the attention the case was getting on social media meant the authorities set up a misinformation page to stop false narratives from spreading.
Zara told the RadioTimes.com: "The documentary is not actually about the case. It's not about the murderer, it's not about the trial.
"The documentary is essentially using this as a case study and it's really important, I think, to have a case that's ongoing for a documentary like this, because people are still in the thick of it."
She insisted the film is "really important" for people to see, because it deals with the "future of how true crime" and similar cases are reported.
She added: "We have to start understanding what we're consuming and what impacts that has not only on the families, not only on the victims, not only on the investigation but also, I suppose, on ourselves as well.
"What does that mean for us going forward? Can we all be sucked into this kind of true crime spectacle on social media?
"And should we be sensationalising and making celebrities of victims and killers as well?"
In the 60-minute documentary, Zara looks to "uncover the story of the social media frenzy that sprung up following the tragic murders" as she travelled to Idaho just under a year after the killings.
She explained: "I started watching videos about this case and then my TikTok For You Page [was] all about this case for genuinely months on end.
"It was building and growing as the case was evolving and more information was coming out and I've just never seen anything like this before. So I thought making a documentary about this would just be really fascinating."
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