Who Trolled Amber Heard?: Inside the podcast exposing the horrors of the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial

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In April 2022, it was unimaginable to flee Depp v Heard. Even for those who weren’t streaming each second of the courtroom proceedings between Johnny and Amber, your feeds had been undoubtedly clogged with associated content material. And by “related content” I imply content material that primarily trashed Amber Heard. Perhaps you noticed tweets declaring #JusticeForJohnny and #AmberIsAnAbuser, or watched individuals hammily appearing out scenes from their marriage on TikTookay, layered over with audio of Heard alleging home and sexual abuse by the actor, like a dystopian pantomime. Or maybe you discovered the trial slipping into your offline, “real” life when getting espresso – the tip jars labelled “Amber” and “Johnny”, with wads of money stuffed into Depp’s.

At the time, a couple of journalists and authorized consultants protecting the trial, comparable to Kat Tenbarge and Lucia Osborne-Crowley, smelt a rat, and urged that a minimum of some of the Amber Heard hate marketing campaign have to be inauthentic. After being inundated with urged YouTube movies of Heard being “EXPOSED” on the stand, alongside ones of Depp visiting hospital sufferers dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow – movies I couldn’t appear to shake from my algorithm – I wrote a chunk for Dazed, during which I accused die-hard Depp followers of having been “swept up in a highly-orchestrated, seemingly money-no-object PR operation”. But what if it was one thing messier, stranger, and extra troubling, and instigated by bad-faith actors unrelated to the case?

Enter Who Trolled Amber? – a podcast investigation that’s each overdue and revelatory. “This story’s horizons are broadening,” reporter and host Alexi Mostrous says in the third episode. Mostrous and his staff started by digging into an enormous dataset of tweets about Depp and Heard. Alarm bells began ringing nearly instantly. One account had tweeted greater than 370,000 occasions since 2021, which, Mostrous calculated, was a put up each two minutes, 24 hours a day, for 3 years. They additionally discover an ostensibly Chilean far-right “political troll who suddenly switches allegiances to attack Amber Heard; Spanish-speaking bot networks posting hundreds of pro-Depp tweets; Thai accounts that tweet once and go viral, and tens of thousands of identical messages left under Amber Heard videos on YouTube”.

The actually surprising revelation at the coronary heart of the collection is simply how huge and complicated the disinformation motion in opposition to Heard was. This was not one single marketing campaign, however a number of, hybrid assaults – with bot armies and actual individuals working in tandem. The Depp/Heard saga was by no means only a story about the public breakdown of a public marriage. Yet, this might be why the disinformation marketing campaign went beneath the radar: superstar tradition functioned as a smoke display screen.

“There was obviously a huge amount of publicity about the case,” Mostrous tells me. “There were always rumours that there were bots and manipulation used. But I was surprised that, although this case involved so much media time and so much money, no one really picked up the bot issue and ran with it.” He suggests this would possibly partly be as a result of, at the time of the US trial, it wasn’t a urgent situation for the authorized groups. “They were more focused on going through the evidence and establishing what had happened. And sometimes it takes a while for these things to settle. It’s not the sort of thing that you can easily analyse in the moment.”

Part of the situation is that “looking into this stuff is really, really difficult,” Mostrous notes. For starters, “there’s an accountability and a transparency problem”. In the world of manipulation, and hacking for rent, “there’s five to 10 to 20 steps between the client, and then his law firm, and then an investigations company based in London that they commission. And then the London-based investigations company commissions an independent but London-based security professional, who knows someone in Israel, who then subcontracts it out to someone in India, who does the hack or the manipulation, feeds the data back up the chain, and then, by the time it gets back to the law firm, there are no fingerprints.” Essentially, the business is efficient exactly as a result of it’s so convoluted.

The most fascinating factor is the on-line misogyny. There’s a lot of it. It makes you fairly depressed, as a result of there was a groundswell of hate that was there, simply ready for a case to return up

Yet, in one other sense, mass on-line manipulation has by no means been less complicated. “It’s easy these days to design pieces of software that can create and run multiple social media accounts that look quite genuine,” Mostrous tells me. “That’s not a particularly onerous process anymore, in a way it might have been five or 10 years ago.”

This results in a conundrum for investigators. “There’s an imbalance between, on the one hand, manipulation campaigns being really easy to create, cheap to put in place, and potentially able to drive conversations,” Mostrous says. “On the other hand, they’re very difficult to detect. They’re super difficult for journalists and researchers, but they’re also not easy even for the platforms to detect, particularly in situations where they’ve cut back on safety teams and on their own resources.” Mostrous sums the scenario up plainly: “There’s this imbalance between how easy it is to perpetrate, and how difficult it is to catch. That’s quite a worrying gap.”

While making Who Trolled Amber, Mostrous knew he and his analysis staff must be rigorous. “What we didn’t want to do was to find some bots and then just say, okay there are some bots, that means something dodgy happened,” he explains. “Because if you take basically any major public discussion on social media, there will be a small proportion of that conversation that is driven by bots. That doesn’t mean that there’s some nefarious bad guy masterminding it.”

Yet, on this case, it wasn’t a “small proportion”. “What was surprising, at least according to one of the researchers,” Mostrous says, “was that 50 per cent of the conversation around Amber had been inauthentically generated.”

Johnny Depp takes to the stand in his defamation trial

(Getty)

Obviously, this doesn’t imply there weren’t enormous numbers of actual individuals who had been keen on the case. They made up the majority of accounts tweeting about Depp. However, Mostrous discovered they had been solely posting about the trial a handful of occasions. Bot accounts, against this, had been tweeting as much as 1,000 occasions a day, that means “the majority of tweets that were posted, were inauthentic”.

In the podcast, Mostrous compares the position of bots in the Depp/Heard story to that of the agent provocateur, “encouraging and inciting ugly elements that were already present”. Daniel Maki – a former spy who put Mostrous onto the case in the first place – places it barely in another way. “We’re looking at something here that feels beyond just the general din of the crowded bar,” he says. “This is somebody getting up on stage, ripping off their pants and throwing eggs at people in the audience”. You couldn’t ignore it, even for those who tried. But was this amplification or instigation? In different phrases, who began it?

To start to reply this, it helps to take a look at the timeline. The database of tweets the podcast staff first digs into had been from April 2020 to January 2021 – over a yr earlier than the US trial started. One 48-hour window proved to be essential. On 6 November, Depp introduced on Instagram that he’d been fired from the third Fantastic Beasts film. (Per week earlier, a UK trial had dominated in opposition to Depp, permitting The Sun newspaper to label him a “wifebeater”.) In the two days that adopted Depp’s announcement, a rash of suspicious bot exercise flooded the web. What’s important about this discovering, is that this additionally occurred 15 months earlier than the US trial. Essentially, this means that by the time most individuals had been participating with the story, it was already too late. While it stays unclear and unverifiable who or what initiated the bot exercise, the groundwork had already been laid for Heard to be damned in the courtroom of public opinion.

Heard and Depp at a 2015 movie premiere, years earlier than their contentious courtroom battles

(Getty)

“There was potentially a lot of manipulation, a lot of inauthenticity before the trial,” Mostrous agrees. “During the trial, there were lots of people who were like, ‘okay, we can make money out of this case’, because they had a constant supply of video images that they could cut and splice, and they could make Amber look bad and they could get clicks. But in a way, that was the more predictable end of things,” he says. “By that time, the internet’s opinion on Amber had already been formed.”

Yet, at the identical time, this technique wasn’t plucked out of skinny air. After all, the #AmberIsAnAbuser content material performed right into a narrative as outdated as time itself: “man suffering at the hands of a manipulative, deceitful, evil woman”.

“When you take a step back from this, actually the most interesting thing is the online misogyny,” Mostrous suggests. “There’s so much of it. It makes you quite depressed, because there was a groundswell of hate that was there, just waiting for a case to come up”. As Who Trolled Amber? continues, Mostrous and his staff discover attainable hyperlinks between the trolling in opposition to Heard and the nation of Saudi Arabia. But maybe there doesn’t have to be a single function behind the marketing campaign. “This is a propaganda war,” cyber safety professional EJ Hilbert says in the collection. The aim is division; destabilisation.

“A lot of disinformation campaigns, especially political ones, have as their ‘objective’ just a sense of instability,” Mostrous agrees. “We saw that in the Russian bot campaign before the US election. I think the more we understand about misinformation campaigns, the more we’re seeing that actually, because they’re so easy to set up, they’re not just limited to political issues anymore.” Indeed, misinformation could also be extra successfully deployed on points that strategy politics side-on, upsetting a tradition struggle.

“There’s no reason why the Depp-Heard case wouldn’t have fallen into that category,” Mostrous tells me. “Because it kind of brings up so many culture war issues about ‘Should you believe all women?’, and “Hasn’t the MeToo movement gone too far?’, and all of that stuff that people, on both sides, feel really, really strongly about.”

(Getty)

Towards the finish of Who Trolled Amber, Mostrous describes the investigation as “a warning”. Recently, I’ve encountered related warnings in Naomi Wolf’s Doppelganger and Sian Norris’s Bodies Under Siege, books that study coordinated far-right assaults on reproductive rights throughout the globe. Is this a cultural tipping level, then, the place we will begin to become familiar with disinformation campaigns? Or has the horse already bolted?

“I think we are slowly coming to terms with the fact this is a big problem,” Mostrous muses. “But at the same time,” he provides, “the technology isn’t standing still either.” As with most tech points, as we attempt to catch up, the whole lot accelerates. “One of the things I do worry about is that it’s quite easy to focus on obvious examples of misinformation,” Mostrous says. Deepfake movies, as an illustration. “Whereas actually, I think if we look at really effective misinformation campaigns, they don’t create lies out of thin air. It’s more that they pose as people who are putting out little bits of truth, but the truth is taken out of context – it’s the out of context bit that drives a real sense of division. And that’s much harder to deal with.”

Effective disinformation depends on data overload. It’s an abuse of how we eat information on-line now, Mostrous suggests: “If we’re just going scroll, scroll, click, click, flick, flick, then we don’t have time to parse the real from the fake. It’s the same with the Russian attempts to subvert the US elections. They didn’t put out lies or fake news, so much as they harnessed and weaponised real news, in a way that increased division. I think that’s the real danger that we’ve got to face up to.”

‘Who Trolled Amber?’ is on the market now



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