You Should be Angry About Amber Heard
This past week, Tortoise Media published a new six-part investigative series, Who Trolled Amber?, reported by Alexei Mostrous. The series — which can be heard in full with a subscription — is an attempt to understand the origins and motivations behind the massive social media efforts to discredit Amber Heard during her British and US defamation trials brought by her ex-husband, Johnny Depp.
If you were online in 2022 you likely remember the case well, and Mostrous does not attempt to re-litigate the trials. He clearly states that, as a journalist, he cannot definitively claim that Depp’s claims were true or false, or know with certainty the details of Heard and Depp’s relationship. Examining the state of social media during the US trial — during which the jurors were not sequestered and had access to Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, et al — will not necessarily prove whether the conclusion of the trial was correct. But it may indicate whether or not the trial was fair.
The podcast moves from finding to finding: more than half of the social media accounts posting anti-Amber Heard statements were inorganic — trolls, either created by bots or by human beings paid to post them. These accounts were well-funded and organized, perhaps by Depp’s legal team or, interestingly, by the Saudi government on behalf of Depp’s friendship with Mohammed bin Salman.
This society of bots and paid actors issuing nonstop anti-Amber sludge formed the foundation of what would become a small industry of social media personalities: posting videos and comments across platforms like Twitter and TikTok and YouTube, carrying the newly lucrative torch of burning Amber Heard’s credibility while earning advertising revenue. To hear these people tell it, Amber was a psychopath and an abuser, as shown in her body language on trial, her expressions, her “obvious” lies. Heard was mocked, online and in the real world in ways that, from a distance, should have flagged as misogynistic and horrendous. After six years of Me Too, after multiple reassesments of how the media treated women in the past decades, the masses had finally found a new witch to burn, and these bots and trolls provided the kindling.
At the time, I remember feeling disgusted by all of it, but when I would talk to friends and acquaintances and family members I felt almost as equally let down — not because they believed the trolls, or because they supported Depp, but because they were ambivalent.
“Weren’t they both abusive?” “She seems as crazy as him.” “It’s none of my business.” “We don’t really know what happened. Why should I care about it?” Even when I shared my own thoughts — that I believe Amber, that I believe she was horribly abused and that nothing she did to protect herself excuses the abuse, that the idea of “mutual abuse” is a deep misunderstanding of power in relationships — nothing changed.
“Why do I care, I don’t even know who that is?”
“He is really rich, who’s to say she’s not doing it for the money?”
“Who knows what really happened?”
“It seems like a mess.”
I understand this impulse. Why should we care about the messy lives of celebrities? Why should I suddenly care about this, when I’d turn around and tell people not to pay attention to, say, the Kardashians? Aren’t there more important things to care about?
This, I believe, is an aspect of the Depp v Heard conversation that Who Trolled Amber? misses: that the trolls and their patrons were able to succeed because so many people, among them those who could easily see the ruse for what it was, remained ambivalent. They saw the complicated separation of a movie star and his blonde ex-wife as nothing more than televised brain rot; reality television, a narrative they weren’t interested in.
The ambivalence worked in Depp’s favor, painting everyone who cared about the situation as equally obsessive, allowing Depp’s defenders — organic and inorganic — to maintain dominance by sheer force of will despite the lack of reason. That is what the media had to pay attention to, that is what drew the attention of anyone who dared to try and understand it, and even those who backed away came with some new bias born of misinformation: “isn’t she crazy?” “didn’t she shit on him?” “it seems like he’s a victim, too.”
There is a chance that you are reading this and recognize that was you, shrugging the situation away or honestly believing in a both-sides argument, asking why you should care. Maybe you believed the trolls, felt bad for Johnny Depp, and moved on with your life. Maybe you thought Amber Heard was a monster. And I am telling you that you were wrong to do so. I am telling you to be angry about it.
You should be angry because you’ve been had. Because the people in control of the disinformation — Depp, his attorneys, the bots, (potentially) the Saudi government — made a bet on you being a fool, and they won.
You are not immune to propaganda.
It is one thing to agree, and to self-isolate, as one could in any pandemic. But the Internet has already guaranteed that misinformation cannot be stifled by isolation; the population should be inoculated. Much like our bodies are not designed to survive a plague, our minds are not designed to recognize the truth.
We are not rational by default, which is a notion that, I think, rubs up against American self-identity: we cannot trust institutions, we should trust our guts. After all, how many elections cycles have you gone through where your fellow voters decided on instinct, on vibes, on “there’s just something I don’t like about her”?
No, this isn’t just about Amber Heard. I am angry — angry that so many smart, good people were fooled for the sake of an abuser. Angry that, in other instances, I was the fool. I am angry and I do not want it to happen again.
In Who Trolled Amber?, one of the experts on trolling campaigns points out that, often, the impetus for these campaigns is just below the surface. After all, why would a foreign government or any other powerful entity really care that much about Johnny Depp’s defamation trial? In actuality, they posit, the goal is to undermine trust in democracy, in institutions, in social justice. In Heard’s case, the trial did not just discredit her, but tore the wheels off of progress made by the Me Too movement and a turn towards justice for victims of abuse that had just barely started to gain traction. It’s not that Amber Heard was a liar, all women are liars, do not deserve power, should be stuck in their place. There is always a more sinister cause below the surface of social panics and media frenzies, and you should be angry about it, because the people who benefit from those causes continue to do so because you, and many people you know, all of us, are taken for fools.
In the last few years I have seen that it does not do to appeal to a person’s sense of justice when cases like Depp v Heard explode in the public media. In many cases, a person feels their sense of justice is solid enough to understand whatever the situation is while still being abstracted from it: it seems messy, none of my business, sounds awful but I have other things to worry about.
And so, as we head into the biggest election year in modern history, as the internet becomes more and more inundated with manipulation, AI, and grifters, I appeal to your sense of self-respect:
Will you let them make a fool of you?
You should be angry about Amber Heard, because she was a victim who was treated cruelly and unfairly. You should be angry about Amber Heard, because her public shaming only helped to boost a system that relies on injustice. You should be angry about Amber Heard because when you were not angry about Amber Heard your ambivalence, or your complicity, made you one of a million puppets serving a purpose that did not serve you. Because you were tricked.
And if you aren’t angry enough, it will happen again.
