Johnny Depp, Amber Heard court cases: Online bots that trolled Heard suggest general election may be plagued by sinister misinformation – Laura Waddell

As elections in US and UK loom, right-wing misogynists look set to spread dangerous misinformation and hate on social media

Did online bots fan the flames of vitriolic social media reception to the Amber Heard versus Johnny Depp trials? The allegations of violence and substance abuse in the breakdown of a marriage became a beacon for the online Manosphere, which used it to stoke resentment against women.

Drawing on age-old misogynist tropes about women being the downfall of men, the wave of anti-Heard sentiment was clear cultural pushback against popular feminist campaigns encouraging women to speak up. The depressing details of the Depp/Heard trials occupied the category of pop culture meets politics, when the world of entertainment makes a significant impact on setting the agenda for discussion and, crucially, reaching a mass audience disinclined to read politics pages.

For those seeking to push an agendas – or, as some suspect, test their ability to do so before applying the same tactics to future campaigns – this has potential to be a powerful Trojan Horse. Donald Trump, the unlikely US President who progressed from entertainment television to a huge, right-wing fan base knows this.

Devil’s advocates

The Depp/Heard story was all over the internet a couple of years ago – difficult to avoid for anyone sickened by it, like those who’ve lived through intimate partner violence themselves. Anecdotally, these news stories make for difficult days on the internet, social media full of devil’s advocates, deniers and defenders whose words can make it feel like what progress we have made is at risk of being eroded.

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You know the old saying that behind every strong man is a strong woman? In the discursive aftermath of such situations, it can feel like, for every man who has harmed a woman, even where there is evidence or admission, there are three men behind him finding ways to exonerate his actions and punish the victim. These guys don’t have to crawl out of the woodwork: they’re just there, aggrieved enough about female emancipation to take a spirited personal stand, nevermind that victims are currently failed in lots of basic ways. In Scotland, less than half of rape and attempted rape trials end in a conviction. In England and Wales, fewer than one per cent of reported rapes end in a conviction.

A new report from Tortoise Media lends weight to the idea that this latent societal misogyny around which bandwagons might form, if encouraged, was supplemented and supercharged by deliberate campaigning around the Depp/Heard trial. Tortoise’s data analysis of around a million tweets critical of Heard from 2020 and 2021 revealed around 50 per cent were found to be fake, some from networks of bots with coordinated tweets, hundreds of accounts sending the same message at exactly the same time.

They also highlighted what appears to be accounts-for-hire, essentially online mercenaries peddling hatred, that periodically switch focus. One account that was an ardent supporter of Depp during his trial had previously stoked right-wing tensions in Chile. Others that attacked Heard had previously praised Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, propaganda accounts which are known in that part of the internet as ‘electronic flies’.

A totemic hate figure

This is not about a difference of opinion; it’s not even about the facts of the trial. An army of online sympathisers – those who might not take interest in politics with a capital P but can be reached by insidious populist propaganda in pop culture – don’t register Depp’s messages about drowning and burning Heard; he admitted in court to sending the message: “I will f*** her burnt corpse afterwards to make sure she is dead.” They consume the content that is pumped out to convince them they are the ones getting a raw deal, vulnerable to unjust persecution.

On any commentable medium, there seemed to be a plethora of surprisingly passionate, vitriolic accounts deeply committed to holding Heard up as a totemic hate figure while minimising actions attributed to Depp. The supposed self-accountability of the Manosphere – of the like popularised by academic Jordan Peterson’s advice to young men to clean their bedrooms or pick-up artists who encourage a bare minimum of hygiene as part of their scammy coaching package to impressionable followers – never goes so far as to encourage taking accountability for their actions’ impact on other people, particularly women.

Think of the almost hysterical defensiveness that arises around the idea of treating women as equals in the workplace – the common old-codger conflation of not sleazing on secretaries with the idea that men can’t do anything anymore without getting into trouble, as seen in all those “has MeToo gone too far?” articles, less interested in the impact of the campaign in any way than whether this new trend of women speaking out was bad for men – a big whiskery, petted-lip tantrum about the prospect of self-regulating, when in the old days, there was more room in public and polite society to not have to consider women, lower in the pecking order, as human beings with full agency.

This insecure, kneejerk self-victimisation is not uncommon but always astounding to see. Online content that provokes an emotional reaction does best. The emotion stoked here is bitterness, just as populist movements looking to scapegoat a minority offer the pacifying simplicity of the suggestion that the great injustices faced by man – in an era of plague, war, and late-stage capitalism – are the fault of witches, women, and the left in general.

It is inevitable that these kinds of tactics and bot farms will be a factor in forthcoming elections, here and in the US; there’s little indication anyone is really ready for digital manipulation, or knows quite how to counter it, not least a political commentariat that still skews male and is too self-consciously disinterested in ‘women’s issues’ to connect the dots of misinformation networks growing stronger through spreading bigotry.