Front Burner - Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, and a legion of Saudi-backed bots

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

The legal proceedings between ex-spouses Johnny Depp and Amber Heard made nonstop headlines in 2022 — and online discourse at the time seemed to be overwhelmingly in favour of Depp. The tweets in particular caught the eye of investigative reporter and Tortoise Media editor Alexi Mostrous. They seemed to be part of a coordinated effort to smear Heard. And the closer he looked, the weirder it got.What's the connection between that trial, Johnny Depp’s friendship with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, and a legion of Twitter bots for hire? Mostrous, who hosts the new podcast Who Trolled Amber?, walks us through his investigation and what it says about whether you can ever really trust what you read online.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. You'll probably remember because it was one of the biggest celebrity news stories of 2022. Amber Heard versus Johnny Depp. Right now, our coverage begins in Fairfax County, Virginia.

Johnny Depp and Amber Heard are facing off in court, and it's already getting ugly. Depp's $50 million defamation suit, countered by Heard's $100 million claim, comes after the actress wrote a 2018 op-ed about surviving domestic abuse, though never naming. The whole thing began when Amber Heard accused her ex-husband of abuse. But if you were on social media, you might have actually thought that the opposite was true. It was this echo chamber of misogyny and hate directed at Amber Heard. Queen of domestic violence claiming that she's a victim of violence is the biggest joke ever. What other options does a violent, predatory narcissist have when they are desperate to control their victims? Your voice is gone, Amber Heard. Die, bitch. We don't want pirates without Johnny Depp. Amber Heard is an abuser.

We're talking about hundreds of thousands of tweets with the hashtag Amber is an abuser. And yes, some of those were from people who were huge fans of Johnny Depp. But the closer that you look at that online chatter, the weirder it gets. A lot of the tweets seem coordinated, scripted. And if you start looking really close, you'll find an absolutely bizarre web of connections

from the other side of the world, where an unlikely ally of the other side of the world, where an unlikely ally of the Pirates of the Caribbean star rules absolute. Today, I'm going to be talking to Alexi Mostros, host of the new podcast Who Trolled Amber from Tortoise Media. And he's going to tell me about what he found and what a campaign against a movie star tells us about how coordinated online misinformation can destroy a reputation and have a huge effect on public opinion. Alexi, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast and talking about all of this with us. Hey, it's a pleasure. So this was obviously a huge story at the time, but I just want to recap some of the main details for people who might have forgotten.

So we're talking about two different trials here, right? One in the UK and one in the US. And can you just give me like a brief recap of what those trials were about and what the results were? Yeah, sure. So there were two trials and the first one was in the UK and it was in 2020. And it happened because the Sun newspaper in the UK, which is a big tabloid newspaper, published a story which called Johnny Depp a wife beater. story which called Johnny Depp a wife-beater. And this was because when Johnny Depp and Amber Heard divorced a few years before, Amber Heard had filed for a restraining order that alleged domestic abuse on the part of Johnny Depp. But everything kind of seemed to have blown over

until that Sun article, and Depp sued the Sun. In the opening arguments, Depp's lawyers argued Miss Heard invented stories of serious violence, saying he's not and never has been a wife beater. Indeed, Depp says it was Mishurd who was the one who started physical fights. Johnny Depp lost that trial and the UK judge found that on the balance of probabilities, because it wasn't a criminal trial. Johnny Depp had physically abused Amber Heard on 12 occasions. So at that point, the Sun was able to kind of do this big front page going, he is a wife beater. And everybody thought Johnny Depp is in like really big trouble. He was fired from a couple of big movies. And his career started to kind of go off the rails. But at the same time that the UK case was happening,

Johnny Depp was suing Amber Heard directly in the US. And this was because Amber Heard had written this opinion piece for the Washington Post newspaper in which she had said, I am a kind of representative for domestic abuse. And I was happy to weigh in on what I saw as the unique phenomena that women and typically women experience in our culture when they come forward against somebody more powerful when they speak up about gender-based violence. So even though the piece didn't name Depp, his lawyer

said, it's clear that everyone who reads this piece will know that it's me. And I deny completely that I've ever been abusive. And so you've defamed me, Amber Heard. So there was a US trial that took place around that issue in 2022, two years after the UK trial. And in that case, a jury found in Johnny Depp's favor. Yeah, so very different outcome than the UK trial. And just to be clear, when they found in his favor, they essentially found that they didn't think that he had abused Amber Heard. And she testified in both of these trials, right? She testified in both of the trials, although she was only effectively like a defendant in one of them. And yeah, you're right. The US trial concluded effectively that she had lied and lied maliciously about the abuse allegations, which the jury found to be false.

One funny thing in this op-ed was incorrect. Nothing. Every word of it is true. So let's talk a little bit about the discourse around both of these trials at the time. I think people will absolutely remember kind of the frenzy around it. But how would you describe what was happening, particularly online? I think the word frenzy is actually really accurate. I think it actually was a frenzy in many respects. From the trending hashtag justice for Johnny Depp to the viral memes mocking Amber Heard, even reenacting her claims of abuse for millions of likes.

And he slapped me in my face. While the TikTok praise for Johnny Depp grows. The US trial was televised and each of the witnesses was filmed from different angles. So that meant on every day of the trial, there were hours and hours of testimony that could be kind of chopped up and clipped and captioned and put all over the internet. And depending on whose side you were on, those clips could be kind of put together

in such a way that would look really bad for one side rather than the other side. So, you know, it was a combination of like that and just this kind of extraordinary situation of having two celebrities. Usually celebrities are really kind of private, they really, really try very hard not to say anything controversial at all. And now you've got these two, well, one huge world famous actor, who's on the stand being accused of like really horrific things being sort of forced to give his side of the story.

And that was really compelling to a lot of people. And, you know, I don't know how you would describe what you were seeing online at the time. But certainly it felt like to me, when I opened Twitter, now X or TikTok, this thing was everywhere, right? It seemed like it was everywhere. And it was what everyone was talking about. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think at one point in terms of the Google search traffic, it was beating the Russia-Ukrainian war.

It was literally everywhere. And there was a lot of abuse kind of woven into that general interest, because the two sides basically kind of got themselves into distinct camps and started like throwing insults at each other. And it quickly got very nasty. I just want to make one thing clear. So the UK trial that we talked about, that was decided by a judge, but the American trial was by a jury, as I think that you mentioned. And just to point out, they were not sequestered at the time, so they had access to their phones and the internet and all of this discourse that was going on, right? Yeah, many people regard that as a critical distinction between the two trials.

The U.S. trial was decided by a jury and the jury, exactly as you put it, were not sequestered, which means although they were told not to look up anything about the case online, they had access to their phones. They went home to their families every night of the trial. at what point are you starting to think that uh at least some of what you're seeing online

is a bit fishy or feels kind of manipulated or is worth looking into more? Like when does that kind of turn for you? Really, not actually during the trial itself. It was at some stage after the trial when I was speaking to someone who I knew within the world of corporate espionage and disinformation, someone who used to be a spy for the Canadians and who then... Sorry, I laugh because we don't meet a lot of Canadian spies over here. But yeah. Well, he was one of those. And then he worked for corporate

intelligence. And he's been a source of mine for years. But he said, look, you've got to take a look at this Johnny Depp Amber Heard thing. I didn't have a whole lot of interest in learning much more about it than what I'd seen in the headlines. Like I'm not particularly interested in celebrity culture stuff. And so I started to try to excise that content from my timeline. And it became apparent fairly quickly that that was not working, which is unusual. I'm actively seeking to not see this stuff, and it is still filling up my feed. And, you know, being a career investigator, my brain kind of went, oh, there's something going on here.

In his opinion, what he was saying online was reminiscent of the sort of disinformation, misinformation campaigns that he was used to tracking in his professional life. And then what do you do after that? You know, I guess this piques your interest, right? And just tell me what happens next. Yeah. So to be honest, I took like a couple of weeks to convince myself that this was a story that was worth looking into. Because like, first of all, it was a story that everyone had written like so much about. There's been documentaries on it, newspaper articles.

Like, was there anything really more more to say and secondly like what was it at heart like a celebrity story you know did it have like wider public interest ramifications and I thought I then spoke to like a few people a few of my friends about the case and like surprisingly large numbers of them said oh yeah but you know wasn't Amber a bit crazy? Or like, I'm sure that Johnny was innocent. And I said, well, did you watch the trial? Why do you think that? And they were like, I don't know.

I just, that's what I heard, I think. And that was interesting because these were guys that were quite probably like on the liberal spectrum of things. And yet they had formed an opinion without really like seeing any evidence that this woman who was alleging domestic abuse was somehow, you know, obviously, like not telling the truth. And, you know, at this point, I didn't have any proof or anything like that. But hypothetically, if these people's opinions had been kind of somehow

manipulated, then that definitely has wider ramifications than just the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp story, particularly in a year where we're like going to see, I don't know, I don't know how many of it's like 50, 50 elections around the world, billions of people literally will go to the polls this year. And, you know, if that happens in an atmosphere where people with vested interests can manipulate opinion online, then that kind of persuaded me it was a story that was worth looking into. I'll see you next time. and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you.

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where all that we're seeing online is not necessarily what it seems, right? And I know you get in touch with this expert and you basically get this massive trove of tweets, right? Yeah, that's right. So we wanted to look at the investigation in two parts. The first was a sort of analytical look into what happened to determine whether or not there was inauthentic behavior to an extent that you

wouldn't expect. Because most topics on social media have like some bots in them, like maybe like 2%, 3%. So just finding bots isn't really telling you that much. And then stage two would be, well, if you establish stage one, then who could have commissioned these bots? Who might have been behind the trolling but the first stage so we got this database uh that had never been properly analyzed before of a million tweets that had been sent in the run-up to the u.s trial where all of which were critical of amber herd in some way and we took that that data to two data analysts and uh they they came back after a few weeks with their results and and that so they had found a number

of specific examples of inauthentic activity which was you know either bot networks or networks that were in other ways suspicious those networks were operating in countries like as far as far away as thailand or spain just to give you an idea a bit, a typical example would be like a Thai account who spends its life tweeting about like, you know, Ray-Ban sunglasses or something like that suddenly puts out a Johnny Depp tweet. And it gets like thousands and thousands and thousands of retweets, but almost no replies. Wow. So like it's got like 25,000 retweets and it's got three replies.

And it's like no one does a tweet that is retweeted 25,000 times with only three people replying to it. And the overall result or the overall conclusion reached by one of the researchers, a man called Johan Chen, was that in his opinion, 50% or more of the million plus tweets that were sent in the run-up to the trial came from inauthentic sources. And then tell me more about where you think that these tweets were originating from. I mean, you mentioned Thailand and why?

Yes. I mean, this is where the investigation, I mean, it's just super, super difficult. It's really, attribution is like really, really, really tricky, because you can kind of the IP addresses, and all of that other information that Twitter has, it's almost impossible to kind of go further and to work out who was behind that network. So attribution, like who commissioned these accounts is actually really hard. And I'm not sure we got to the bottom of it at all. We did identify one country that seems to have been linked to some of these pro Johnny Depp accounts. Tell me more. So basically, we found all these Johnny Depp accounts that operate on Twitter like today. And they look like genuine Johnny Depp fan accounts. They've got like pictures of Johnny Depp on. They tweet like 20 times a day a day about johnny depp it's only depp depp depp depp and and the only other thing they tweet about is how much

they hey amber heard okay so so that's fine that we saw a lot of genuine examples of that but when you when you type in the details into the wayback machine which is like a website that stores historic versions of websites you see that like they've deleted like hundreds and hundreds of tweets from 2021 and 2022 and before. And all of those tweets, none of those tweets are in English. All of them are in Arabic. None of them mention Johnny Depp or indeed any other celebrity. They're just totally not interested in any celebrity. They are very interested in promoting in Arabic pro-Saudi government messaging. So like, isn't Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, isn't he brilliant? God save MBS or God save Vision 230, the Saudi initiative to pour billions of pounds into transforming this country.

to like pour billions of pounds into transforming this country. So we took these accounts, these deleted tweets to two experts in Saudi Arabian politics and disinformation. They said that in their opinion, they look like these Johnny Depp accounts were accounts set up by the Saudi government as part of what's known as its electric fly army, which is basically its sort of state run bot army that is very famous for like, promoting Saudi interests and disparaging Saudi

Arabian enemies. I don't know if you want to get into the details of the Jamal Khashoggi case. But when that journalist was murdered by the Saudi regime, a few years ago, there were loads of bots pro Saudi bots that came on to sites like Twitter in the months afterwards, basically saying that was murdered by the Saudi regime a few years ago, there were loads of bots, pro-Saudi bots, that came onto sites like Twitter in the months afterwards, basically saying that Saudi had nothing to do with it and anyone saying that was an enemy of the state. So it's quite interesting to hear that these Depp accounts exhibited very similar characteristics to the sort of accounts that did that.

I feel like, Alexi, the very obvious question here is, why would accounts that were promoting Saudi interests, like messaging around how the Saudi government had nothing to do with the Jamal Khashoggi case I know of course US intelligence has found that MBS

knew and ordered that attack Mohammed bin Salman why would they pivot to defending American celebrity Pirates of the Caribbean star Johnny Depp? Yeah, it's weird, huh? Yeah. So, well, I mean, you start looking online and you do some research about what Saudi and Depp have in common.

And all these links start to come up. So Saudi Arabia partly financed through millions of dollars, the last two films that Johnny Depp produced, Jean de Berry, a period drama and, and his latest film Modi, both are heavily financed by Saudi money. He himself, the actor has been to Saudi Arabia on a number of occasions in the last two years, including for holiday. And the most kind of weird and shocking thing that we learned is that Johnny Depp and MBS himself seem to have formed a very close personal friendship. And the journalist and writer who knows most about that, a man called Bradley Hope, told me that MBS and Depp have spent kind of countless hours together

on MBS's yacht and in his house talking, you know, staying up and playing guitar together. So, yeah, it's like loads of actors and other sports personalities have accepted Saudi money. That in itself is not particularly unusual. But Depp does appear to have this very unique friendship with the head of the authoritarian head of this state that no other celebrity has. Alexei, how easy is it to mount a campaign like this?

Oh, well, that's a really interesting question. I think that it is probably easier than most people think or realize. Like we spoke to a number of people within the misinformation industry. And, you know, so long as you have a few hundred dollars, maybe a few thousand dollars, then you can you can mount a bot campaign against someone that you want to take down. Like the more money you have, the more sophisticated it's going to be, the more that the accounts you use are going to be like, you know, are going to have like proper kind of biographies and all of that. But like on a basic level, it's much, much less than people think it would be. Right. Really makes you think about all the things we're probably missing right now,

you know, especially thinking about what you said earlier, the 50-some elections that are happening around the world. You know, after working on this, I'm just so interested to hear your thoughts on how you're thinking about online discourse now. Of course, before you did this podcast, I'm sure you had lots of skepticism about what you were seeing online. But has your thinking around it evolved? Yeah, what are you thinking now?

Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking it's quite depressing, to be honest, because like, it really does show, especially with the rise of chat GPT and generative AI technology, that it is very, very difficult to really tell what is real and what is fake, what is human and what is not online, particularly given like how we consume online information. You know, it's so comes at us so quick, we scroll through it so fast, it's easier to kind of pick up a vibe of how something is playing out than it is to like properly analyze a particular piece of information. So like if you wanted to create a vibe that Amber Heard was a terrible person, that's possible. If you wanted to create a vibe that there was a specific political issue that was blowing up when actually it wasn't. And you can do that.

One of the most worrying interviews that I think we did was when we spoke to this fake journalist called Julian, who worked for a French PR company. And he wrote like hundreds of articles for this company's clients. And the articles didn't appear under his name or under the company's name, they appeared under like fake, fake names, or real names of people that weren't him. So like he wrote like articles pretending to be like senior political figures in the in African governments or nurses or like journalists or professors or and these these were sent into the ecosystem of knowledge. And they didn't have the purpose of like telling us something new

or newsworthy. They had the purpose of promoting a particular company's point of view. And yet they were indistinguishable. There was a fire in Flamandville, one of the French nuclear plants in Normandy. And just after a few hours after the fire, then I was asked to write a story to say how safe the plants were. I don't know how many of those firms are out there and how that all mixes in with the bots and the trolls online. But it means that if you read something online and it colors your opinion in some way, you can't tell really where that

has come from, where that source has come from, or the motivation of why it is there. Yeah. I know that you reached out to Johnny Depp while you were working on this podcast, and he never got back to you. But you were able to talk to Amber to amber heard and what did she have to say about all this i can't really say because we spoke off the record but in a way i was sort of i'm sort of pleased that i don't think this project would have worked if it if it had been like me and amber like working together to uncover a bar army yeah i mean the the debate is so kind of poisoned around her and around johnny johnny depp himself like i got a lot of people online at the moment saying oh you spoke to amber heard that must mean that she paid for you to do this investigation this bias investigation

and i'm like wow that's that's just on the basis of i put like one line about like me having a conversation off the record conversation with her where I said, okay, here are our findings. I feel like I should show them to you. I'm really glad that we didn't start off the whole show with a big interview with her because it would have just meant that everyone listening to it would have just said, okay, this is just a puff piece. Yeah. Alexi, this was really fascinating. Thank you. And your podcast is fantastic.

Thank you. I know I was telling you that before our interview. I hope everyone listening goes out and downloads it. They can do that. But I think you can just type in Who Trolled Amber, right?

And it'll come up. Who Trolled Amber on wherever you get your podcasts. Wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Alexi, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. All right, that's all for today.

I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.