As the families of three men missing from Vancouver Island endure an excruciating wait for answers, they are also fighting a growing wave of online speculation, vitriol and personal attacks.

In the month since Dan Archbald, Ryan Daley and Ben Kilmer vanished in two separate cases, a number of Facebook groups have sprung up dedicated to rumour, conjecture and amateur keyboard sleuthing. In some cases, the groups have drawn thousands of participants.

Unfounded rumours and speculation have become so severe that the families of Archbald and Daley took down the Facebook page they’d created to help find the men, who went missing near Ucluelet, B.C., on May 16.

Multiple posts in one group levelled apparently baseless allegations at family members of the missing men, some suggesting the families are involved in the disappearances and, in one case, mocking a family member’s faith.

Privately, the messages are worse.

“It’s just vitriolic and awful,” said Shannon Wiest, who has been acting as the family spokesperson and is a close friend of Kilmer’s wife, Tonya.

“It’s incredible how much hatred is being directed at a family who just needs our help, often presented under the guise of wanting to ‘do it better,’” Wiest said. “No one is more focused on how to find Ben than his family and close friends.”

Wiest said as the comments have become worse and the speculation more wild, Kilmer’s family members have had to insulate themselves from social media, leaving the moderation of the family-sanctioned Find Ben Kilmer page to Wiest and other friends.

They’ve since spent almost as much time moderating the public comments on the page as they have organizing continued searches for Kilmer.

The RCMP said rampant speculation not only causes negative impact on victims and their families, but it can also hamper investigations.

Cpl. Tammy Douglas of the RCMP Island District stressed police don’t rely on online speculation for investigations but said false information can impact the information they receive.

“Our greatest concern would be that people, especially those who have information related to a case, hear something that is not accurate or is untrue, and they then discount what they saw, heard or know and not call the police,” Douglas said in an email.

People who do think they know something should check with police rather than rely on the internet to determine if it may be of use to them, Douglas said.

“If someone has information, which may assist in furthering any investigation, we ask that they provide that information directly to the police, which can then be fact-checked and corroborated, rather than online,” she said.

In her role as spokesperson, Wiest has faced personal attacks herself.

“I’ve had people saying ‘You’re not a real friend, you’re only in this for your 15 minutes of fame. You should be the one at the bottom of a ravine,’” Wiest said.

Ryan Daley’s sister-in-law Lindsey Youell said her family has struggled with similar online rhetoric as well.

“We have received a lot,” Youell said. “Everyone was very fascinated that the boat was coming up from Panama and what they could have been doing with it, so lots of speculation about that.”

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In one case, Youell said multiple commenters confused her brother-in-law with someone who had been charged with drug offences in Victoria.

“It wasn’t even the right Ryan,” she said. “People are speculating about everything in conversation on the Facebook page as though the families, who are sitting there worried, aren’t reading them. It is awful.”

It wasn’t always like this, Youell said. When the search for Archbald and Daley first began, Youell said the families were blown away by the outpouring of support they received.

“We’ve also had so many people who are just desperate to help and giving a ton of good wishes,” Youell said.

“Everyone who thinks they may have seen them reached out to us, and we chased a lot of businesses down to look at their (security camera) footage. People have also been extremely kind in that way,” she said.

With police in both cases remaining tight-lipped, the gossip mill has kicked into overdrive, drawing tenuous links between other missing persons cases, some of which are years or decades old.

Joseph Uscinski is an associate professor of political science at the University of Miami, who studies conspiracy theories and those who believe in them. He said most conspiracy theories come from a desire to solve apparent mysteries.

“When we don’t get an answer, it allows our minds to draw more heavily on our previous positions than on available evidence,” he said.

People will say things about what “feels right to them,” he said, and it will often fall in line with their existing world view.

Stressing he doesn’t know anything about the Vancouver Island cases specifically, Uscinski said when a mystery pops up in a community, speculation can get out of control.

“You can run into these sorts of panics where people are either confronted with a mystery or a tragedy, and if you don’t have an answer, people can start freaking out and pointing fingers at each other,” he said. “We had witch trials where that happened.”

Jeremy Nuttall is the lead investigative reporter for StarMetro Vancouver. Follow him on Twitter: @Nuttallreports Jesse Winter is an investigative photojournalist for StarMetro Vancouver. Follow him on Twitter: @jwints and Instagram: @jwintsphoto

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