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When a legal battle between former spouses Johnny Depp and Amber Heard unfolded in a Virginia courtroom in 2022, multiple TV documentaries, podcasts and dramas followed in its wake. Depp had launched a $50mn defamation lawsuit against his ex-wife following a newspaper opinion piece in which she stated she was “a public figure representing domestic abuse”. Heard subsequently filed a $100mn countersuit accusing Depp of defaming her by claiming her allegation was untrue. As well as dominating mainstream news, the dispute also played out across social media. In the court of public opinion, Depp was overwhelmingly painted as the victim while Heard, the subject of vicious memes and hashtags, was branded a liar.
Surely, then, the last thing we need is yet another documentary on Depp vs Heard. But Who Trolled Amber?, the latest podcast from Tortoise Media, isn’t about the he-said, she-said of the trial. It is about social media activity during and after the hearings, whether it influenced the outcome (the jury found in favour of Depp, though Heard won on one aspect of her countersuit) and what that means for justice and democracy.
With the help of computer experts and data analysts, the series host Alexi Mostrous (Sweet Bobby, Dr Anti-vax) combs through thousands of Twitter, Instagram and TikTok posts about Heard, looking at where they came from and whether they were part of an organised campaign. It’s worth noting that Depp lost a libel case in the UK against The Sun newspaper in 2020 (the paper had published an article calling him a “wife beater”). So what made a US jury, which wasn’t sequestered and had internet access throughout, come to a different conclusion? It’s with typical equanimity that Mostrous notes his interest is “not whether the jury’s decision was right but whether it was fair”.
One analyst deduces that more than half of the millions of anti-Heard posts were created by “inauthentic” users, meaning automated accounts (bots) and individuals pretending to be someone they are not. The sheer volume of posts, he adds, has a direct impact on a platform’s algorithms, meaning genuine users are more likely to join in the scrum and public opinion be swayed.
Mostrous goes on to look at other cases of orchestrated social media posting, including the case of Cameron Herrin, the Florida boy racer jailed after accidentally killing a mother and her baby in his car, who gathered a disturbingly fanatical online following after he had been convicted. Perhaps the most shocking revelation is how little it costs to mobilise an army of bots — about $100, says one expert — even though the real-world impact is incalculable.
Unlike much of the Depp/Heard content, Who Trolled Amber? isn’t merely a retelling of a celebrity scandal, or a cynical attempt to poke the hornet’s nest. It’s a thoughtful, compelling and frequently alarming tale of industrial-scale misogyny and online manipulation and of lives and livelihoods derailed.
‘Who Trolled Amber?’ is available from February 27, lnk.to/WhoTrolledAmber
Read the full article here