There Are No Girls on the Internet - Why did right wing media spend money spreading anti-Amber Heard content?

Episode Date: June 7, 2022

We need to talk about the Amber Heard Johnny Depp defamation trial    Toxic fans have made Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s trial inescapable: https://www.polygon.com/23068724/johnny-depp-amber-heard-trial-twitch-youtube-tiktok Follow Ryan Brodericks’ newsletter Garbage Day: https://www.garbageday.email   The Bleak Spectacle of the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp Trial by Micheal Hobbes: https://michaelhobbes.substack.com/p/the-bleak-spectacle-of-the-amber?s=r   The Daily Wire Spent Thousands of Dollars Promoting Anti-Amber Heard Propaganda: https://www.vice.com/en/article/3ab3yk/daily-wire-amber-heard-johnny-depp?utm_source=vice_facebook&utm_medium=social   Join our newsletter: Tangoti.com/newsletter Want to support the show? (thank you!) Subscribe, tell a friend, leave a review, or buy some merch at There Are No Girls on the Internet’s store: TANGOTI.COM/STORE Say hello at [e-mail] See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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The viral nature of this stuff is tried directly to Capital, and you can make a lot of money going really viral, posting, all kinds of breathless updates about this very sad and weird trial. There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. In 2018, after Amber Hurd published an op-ed in the Washington Post, in it, she wrote, quote, I spoke up against sexual violence and faced our culture's wrath. That has to change.

And, quote, I became a public figure representing domestic abuse, and I felt the full force of our culture's wrath for women who speak out. And finally, quote, I had the rare vantage point of seeing in real time how institutions protect men accused of abuse. Now, in these three statements that did not specifically name anyone as her abuser, a jury of five men and two women, found that Amber Hurd defamed her ex-husband, actor Johnny Depp. Back in 2020, Johnny Depp sued the British tabloid of the son for calling him a wife beater, and he lost. Now, the judge in that case ruled that Amber Heard's abuse claims were, quote, substantially true. But unlike that trial that Depp lost in 2020, the most recent trial was live-streamed and disseminated.

in seemingly endless clips on social media. Outside the Virginia courthouse, people waited for hours, some hardcore deaf fanatics, even dressed in cosplay of his character Captain Jack Sparrow from the movie Pirates of the Caribbean. Now, I didn't watch the trial, but that doesn't mean I could escape it.

I learned about the trial in memes and TikTok videos that framed Amber Heard as a crazy, lying, deceitful bitch. And the right-wing website, The Daily Wire, spent thousands of dollars spreading this exact message around the internet. So what does this mean about our digital culture? What does it mean for women? What does it mean for survivors?

I spoke to Ryan Broderick, tech writer and editor of Garbage Day, a newsletter about memes and the internet, about the trial, the verdict, and what it all says about the internet. So, you know, tell us about how you came to be somebody who studies and pays attention to memes and what they tell us about society. My villain origin story, I suppose, started in college.

I was a journalism major, and I liked the internet a lot, and I didn't understand why no one in my journalism classes wanted to talk about what was happening on the internet. I was reading all these great websites all the time and none of my professors wanted to deal with it. And so I guess out of spite, I started to pay more and more attention to what I was seeing on the internet. And then when I started to do my first jobs and internships, there was a lot of stuff happening online that no one was talking about. So I thought, okay, this will be like my way in. And I'd ever really moved past that. I've always just been really interested.

And now people use the internet in technology. I'm a fan of sci-fi, so I suppose that's kind of a part of that as well. And now I read a newsletter called Garbage Day, which is about memes, trends, technology, forecasting, stuff like that. And I have a podcast called The Content Minds, which is me and a friend named Luke Bailey. He's the head of audience development for the INews in the UK. And we basically get in like long protracted fights about what's happening on Twitter every week. That's my pitch for the show. Yeah, I know.

And it's good. It's a good time to write about the internet and to think about the internet because I think after the Trump era where things got very annoying, we're now in this moment of like infinite possibility. And there's all these really interesting stories happening, whether it's crypto, the metaverse, TikTok memes that are going feral. It's all just really good stuff. And I feel like I've been waiting many years for this level of internet pop culture

breakthrough. I mean, that's actually a great place to start talking about this trial. You know, in a piece for Polygon, you wrote, the trial is set off a toxic fandom bomb, as major social platforms incentivize the worst human behavior possible to drive up their engagement metrics. And during Dept v. Heard, the defensiveness, ugliness, and outrage cycle of online fan communities has infected every corner of the web like a virus, taking shape of the content that does well on those platforms. So tell us, you know, What you mean by that and how have you seen this trial playing out online? Yeah, I mean, it's definitely an evolution of something I think we saw a lot on spaces like Tumblr and Reddit 10 years ago.

When fandoms were kind of still more niche, you know, that weird, I'm really kind of obsessed with that weird period of time between, let's say, like, the Breaking Bad starting and the Walking Dead starting and then like the last season of Game of Thrones. And in that weird period of time, you go from fandoms being still kind of niche, nerdy, things that only kind of pop up during Comic-Conns and things like that to essentially the mainstream, like the Disney adults, the Harry Potter adults, these people who may have been teenagers are in college 10 years ago and now they're adults. And they're acting like adults, but they're also still obsessed with fandoms. And the internet has evolved beyond these small corners on Tumblr and Reddit. So now that this is super mainstream everywhere. And I think in a lot of ways the really disgusting, and I think it is disgusting behavior that people were engaging in around this trial, is the manifestation of those fandom spaces,

just not going away and becoming more entrenched. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that we live in a time of deeply consolidated pop culture, you know, Disney owns everything and if stuff that they don't own is owned by Netflix and stuff that they don't own by Warner Brothers. And that's kind of it. And so these companies, I think, they feed into this. They, they sort of feed the beast. And these fandoms have become extremely powerful, extremely engaging, extremely sticky culturally. And they, they don't, they're just full of people who act outrageous all the time and are, and in my opinion, getting worse. Because, you know, you may have seen like fandom blogs fighting with each other as teenagers on Tumblr 10 years ago,

but now these are like full grown adults spending sometimes like $35,000 I read. One woman paid that much to go to the trial and like bring alpacas so that Johnny Depp could pet her alpacas in case he was feeling depressed. Like this is this is absurd and no one seems to be thinking it's absurd, which is even crazier to me. One of the things is that I want to talk specifically about the Daily Wire and like, what this trial might mean for, like, right-wing types. But I don't want to give the impression that it's all, you know, I don't know. I guess when I first heard about this case, I was like what's clearly like right-wing types, men's rights, in-cells.

But it's also like this mixed bag of, I guess, like, fandom types. Can you give us a little breakdown of who you see the major players as? Yeah. So I've tried to sketch out this landscape. And unfortunately, I have to kind of make like these vague summaries. You know, I have to kind of, because you're talking about blobs of culture. So think of it like this. I would say a large chunk of the people who were pro Johnny Depp are Disney adults,

people who genuinely miss Johnny Depp. They have like a nostalgic attachment to him, whether it's the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise or some other thing that he's a part of, and they want him back. And they feel like he shouldn't have been removed from pop culture. You also have released the Snyder Cut people, these like fans of the DC Entertainment Universe who believe that Amber Hurd's like interpersonal drama with Johnny Depp, to put it very lightly,

was impacting their ability to see new superhero movies. And a lot of those guys are the same guys who make YouTube videos about Star Wars characters they don't like who just so happen to be women or people of color. And they're the same guys who are probably teenagers during the Gamer Gate era. So I sort of see that as like the same man, the same like horrible Reddit YouTube man.

You also have men's rights activists who see this trial as a proxy battle for Me Too. They believe that the Me Too movement went too far, even though like nothing happened to any of the powerful men, really. But they believe it went too far and now this is a way to pull back and fix things so that like, you know, powerful men can continue being shitheads. You do have right-wingers, though they were pretty late to the trial. And we'll talk about the Daily Wire in a second, but they really actually struggled to insert themselves into this because I don't think this was like really their battlefield. You also have, and this is very interesting, because Johnny Depp was removed from the Fantastic Beast franchise, which is a prequel series to Harry Potter, you have Harry Potter adults who believe that him being removed from the franchise screwed up the success of that franchise.

And because you have Harry Potter adults, and because J.K. Rowling is such a vicious anti-trans. activist, you have turfs as well. You have trans exclusionary radical feminists. So it's this really bizarre blob of some of the worst obsessive people on the internet who have all rallied around this one trial because they've decided

this is the trial that will also dictate their weird obsession and its relevancy in popular culture. Wow. Yeah. I mean, talking about the Harry Potter stands and like turf types, like

way to be feminist, smearing a woman who was a survivor of domestic violence. I guess that really shows how deep their feminist, their feminist ideology goes. Yeah, I interviewed this, she's unbelievable. Her name is Amanda Brendan. I interviewed her for my polygon piece.

She used to work at Tumblr. Now she does like trends research. And I couldn't use this quote because it was just like, it was so much to put in the piece. But essentially she, she was sort of arguing that the same women who were, or young girls who are bullying other women and girls on Tumblr 15 years ago are now the ones, like, threatening to murder Amber Hurd on TikTok as, like, full-grown adults.

Wow. And it's that same toxic strain of fandom and, like, a very particular fan fiction archetype of, like, loving the really toxic character that, like, I can fix him type. The Ray Lowe's, the women who believe that, like, Ray should have ended up with Kylo-Ren and Star Wars. Like this very specific kind of thing seems to be happening around a real person. And they don't seem to understand that like Johnny Depp isn't any of his characters. He's like, uh, uh, from all accounts, a very bad person. Um, I, I hope that it's not defamatory to say, I believe he's a bad person. Um, and these, a lot of it is, is, is, is, is not right wingers. It's not

politically motivated. It's like women who are like getting tattoos of his lawyer and then, Oh, my God. Did you see that they were writing erotic fan fiction about Johnny Depp hooking up with his lawyer? Like, just insane nonsense. Like, craziness. Like, I would say go outside, but they are going outside. They're going to the trial, which is so much worse. Like, stay inside maybe.

I don't know. It's just, it's awful. Yeah. I mean, I know exactly that type. And I think a lot of Johnny Depp's, the different characters that he's portrayed really feeds into it that, like, you know, you look at like Edward Cizzerhand. Like, oh, I'm like a really quiet, sweet. soul who's very innocent or like I'm like a really charming pirate that you just want to hang out with. I think that like a lot of people are projecting, grown adults are projecting a lot onto these

characters that, you know, they're fictional. They're not, like Johnny Depp is not actually a pirate. He's not actually this like sensitive guy with scissors for hands. Yeah, he's not a pirate. He's not, he is not Hunter S. Thompson. He is just like a man who seems to have a really bad drug and alcohol problem and like has a series of extremely toxic relationships with other people. So like, yeah, he's not like your small being that you can fix, you know. Exactly. And I think you bring up fandom and I think that really explains this phenomenon with the trial that I don't know that I've ever really seen before, which is the way that it has been

memed and turned into these like fan videos, particularly on TikTok, you know, I am someone who I'm not too proud to admit that like I spent a lot of time hyper-analizing. famous people that I had crushes on to be like, oh, he, there was a longing glance here, so that means this. And I see the way that these videos have really flooded Internet spaces where they have the tinge of fan videos. Have you seen this? Yeah, no. In fact, my co-host, Luke Bailey on our podcast pointed out that it's essentially the same behavior that was behind like the Larry shipping from one directioners, the idea that like Liam and Harry were secretly a couple. And you could prove it by hyper-analizing their hand.

touching each other during a press conference. It's the same stuff we see with BTS as well. You know, it's this idea. And in my opinion, it also ties in with our obsession with true crime at the moment. It's this idea that there's so much media being produced. There's so many videos and images and takes and spins on a thing that I think as human beings, we assume that all of our answers can be found there. It's the same thing we thought that Gabby Petita disappearance.

is the same thing we see with all of these TikTok trends where it's like, your brain almost goes like, okay, if there's a live stream of the trial, and there's so many ways to watch the trial, I must be able to figure out exactly what's going on, because if I'm not able to do that, that's almost like it's like psychologically upsetting, the idea that like you could be lied to by what you're seeing with your own eyes. And I think if I want to give a benefit of the doubt to anyone involved

with making some of this like horrible content on TikTok, I think that's what's going on. Is this idea like, oh, of course, I could figure out if he's lying or not or she's lying. Because if I couldn't, then I can't trust anything that I see. Maybe that's what's happening. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that like with discovery, there's just so much content, so many video, so many text messages that it's, I think that we, I think it really demonstrates that we've created an internet landscape that is really, that incentivizes, I guess, conspiratorial thinking that like there must be. some way to put this all together to prove that she is like a gone girl style lying bitch who

has been for years, you know, coalescing to take this man down. Right. Even though that seems so outlandish, I almost believe that our internet spaces are, like, incentivize things that are, the more outlandish they are, the more, like, difficult to believe they are, the more traction they'll get. Yeah, I think that's true. And I, I'm as someone who stares at this stuff all day long, I want to really be really clear. Like, I'm not someone who believes that internet users are inherently bad.

or inherently act crazy. I think they respond to incentives and they respond to like different user experience choices. And I think right now on the internet, there is not a single social network that does not sort of incentivize acting like a complete maniac. I think they all give you like a weird point system that rewards the worst behavior imaginable,

whether that's through retweets or likes or upvotes or your audio trending or whatever it is. And so when it comes to a moment like this trial, there's not a place you can go on the internet that's not going to give you more points for being more insane. And that's just a really sad thing. I wonder what Discord conversations have been like because that's a place where maybe you're not incentivized to be awful, although maybe you are. I don't know. I just think that like it's unfortunate that the majority of the people who are following this trial, we're following it through TikTok and YouTube, which are platforms that will reward. you for being more extreme and more annoying than the next person.

Let's take a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes.

Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business.

Think IHeart. streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano, and our podcast, Point Game is about defying the odds. Like LeBron heading into the playoffs without Luca and Austin Reed. And finding ways to win no matter what.

He's the smartest player to ever play the game. His IQ is at a level that we've never seen before. And he knows. Without Luca and Austin Reeves, I got to manipulate the game. We get a player's perspective. on the challenges of the playoffs. I think Joker's going to be exhausted this series because when they don't have Rudy in the lineup,

he has to really guard guys like Nas Reid. He has to guard Julius Randall. And then he has to give us everything he gives us on the night-to-night basis on offense. And when IT's friends stop by, like Quentin Richardson, we dive into some playoff history too. Steve Nass would get that thing.

That man, hell get the flying. He running up the court, licking his fingers, why he got the ball, like, after you go through a training camp with that ice ice, Ed, you figure it out real quick. Get your ass up and down the court, and you're going to get the ball.

So listen to Point Game on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone, it's Ryder Strong and Will Ferdell from PodMeets World. And now the Pod Meets Twirled podcast. We're two men who were completely clueless to reality TV, who now have covered Dancing with the Stars, Traders, and we're gearing up for the season finale of Survivor. So, yeah, now we're experts. I know we annoyed a lot of our listeners by our severe lack of survivor knowledge. That is the point of the show.

I'm just going to remind you. I have watched some survivor. I obviously haven't watched enough. Did people not like it? Yeah. Just because we? Yeah. We'll be recapping the big conclusion in the 50th season from the final attempts at gameplay

to the desperate plea as the finalists to a bunch of who. Ha, ha, ha, who. Again, we are experts. So make sure to tune it at Pod meets Twitter. world for all our Survivor 50 takes. Listen to PodMeets Tworl on the IHeard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. On platforms like TikTok and YouTube, content creators have built entire platforms hyper-analyzing

the trial. And it really reminds me of the days of tabloid court TV on the OJ Simpson trial where so-called body language experts try to glean whether or not someone is lying or telling the truth based on the way they use their hands or purse their lips in videos of the trial. And even though it's kind of a bunk pseudoscience, claims about body language to depict Amber Hurd as a liar have flooded the internet discourse about the trial. On YouTube, you're rewarded and you can kind of be like, celebratized. Like I've seen all of these like body language experts, scare quotes around that or like legal experts or whatever, really making platforms off of like commenting on this trial in a way that I'm not sure that's healthy for our under our, our, our under our, our understance. of what's happening. I'm not sure it's like a healthier internet ecosystem when that is so

incentivized to the point where you can really make a name from it. Yeah. I mean, like, let's be clear. Like, there's no such thing as a body language expert. Like, there's just not. Like, there's, like, our artificial intelligence stuff would be much better if we could give it information from body language experts. They don't exist. It's not a thing. Like, there's really, and yet, and yet there is this desire to have that because, you know, it's like if someone's on camera, like you want to be able to get inside their head and know what they're thinking, but it's not possible. It's just not. And also, I mean, I don't want to get too, like, serious, but like a traumatized person and abused person, an allegedly abused person,

is probably not going to act in public the way you think they act or think they should act. This is actually very similar to the couch guy stuff on TikTok. So if you don't know, if your listeners don't know, a girl walks in a surprise her boyfriend, the boyfriend doesn't react positively or negatively. He just sort of looks stunned. There's a girl on the couch next to him. People start making conspiracy theories that he was cheating and he got caught cheating. None of it seems to be real. But I think what's like a really interesting dynamic sometimes with TikTok in particular is that when like video footage hits TikTok of real life that doesn't look like the cinematic version that we're used to, people assume it's not real. That's like saying like,

oh, I can't recognize real life because it doesn't. look like a movie. And kids on TikTok are reacting really aggressively when that happens because it makes them uncomfortable. And I think that was a part of this as well, another dimension to this trial. Oh, my gosh. I mean, I don't want to get too far off base, but we did an episode about why so many fabricated videos claiming to be from Ukraine during the invasion were able to like people believe them. And part of it is that we have something going on where when we expect things to look cinematic. And so people were able to take things from movies or video games or cartoons and be like, oh, this is what's happening in Ukraine.

And people believed it because of our need to have things be so cinematic. And I think we're losing our ability to tell when something is real or something is kind of bullshit because of it. I think it's worse. I think we prefer the bullshit because it's more comfortable. Like, if you, if you're faced with like raw life in a video, it's actually pretty uncomfortable. It's like, you know, the Ukraine stuff is disturbing because it doesn't look like a movie. There's no like action hero running through the crowd, like saving people. It's like, it's awful.

It's weird. If you're watching it like essentially a trial about defamation regarding a domestic violence allegations, it's not going to look like, you know, Mr. Smith goes to Washington. It's going to look like a really sad, weird dissolution of an extremely toxic relationship. And it's not going to look good. It's not going to be funny. and it's probably not going to be comfortable to watch it with the Wii storm song. Oh my gosh. Why did that song become the song of this trial?

It's bizarre to me. Because it didn't hurt. It didn't physically hurt me. I have never seen a trial be memed the way that this trial was. You know that catchy little song you hear when you log on to a Nintendo Wii? Doot, doot, doot, doot, do to doot. Well, if you're thinking that no one would ever use such a cheery, upbeat song, On a video from a trial about something as serious as domestic violence,

you would be wrong. Here's another example. A sneaky sounding song from the children's show The Backyardigans is often used on TikTok to illustrate someone being duplicitous or trying to get away with something. After Herd's lawyer held up a makeup palette from the cosmetics brand Malani, after testifying that Amber used the makeup to cover bruises that she says that Johnny Depp gave her,

the Malani brand used video from the trial to create a cheeky TikTok scored to the backyard. Yardigan song, pointing out that the specific product that her lawyer held up had not been released until after Amber Heard and Johnny Depp broke up. Now, her lawyer never actually claimed that Amber Heard specifically used that Malani product, just that she used makeup. But the video pretty clearly implies that they've caught Amber Heard in a cosmetics-based lie, proving her guilt, a la the climactic scene from the film Legally Blonde.

Now, it's clear to me why a brand would want to get in on this. According to BuzzFeed, that one piece of content is Malani Cosmetics's most watched TikTok ever with 5 million views. Now prior to this, none of their videos had ever broke 500,000 views. But it's pretty distasteful for a makeup brand to benefit from weighing in on a trial about domestic violence using a cutesy meme on TikTok. And because the jury in this trial was not sequestered, it's entirely possible that jurors also watched all of this play out too. It is so weird. I remember that thing where it during the trial, Amber Hurd said that she used this, this makeup to cover her bruises. And her lawyer held up this makeup palette, Malani.

And then on TikTok, Malani made this like, cutesy response video being like, ooh, it didn't come out until this year. Like, here's our. And I think it's this, I think it's two things. I think it's one, exactly like you said, like people, people want a trial that regarding abuse to, look like a movie where someone's going to catch somebody in a lie and be like, aha, and like they're going to break down and admit that they were wrong. And I think that, you know, there would be a time where a big brand getting into the conversation about a trial regarding domestic violence, a very serious thing, making a cutesy little

meme on TikTok using the backyard again song, you know, as the sound. I found that to be so distasteful. And like I said, I just have never seen a trial where people and brand, and stuff commented on it. Like the way that that should be commented on by the brand, if the brand really wants to get into it, is by like a terse public statement. Not a cutesy little meme TikTok video.

I just found that so distasteful. I mean, you bring up a really good point. And this is like a thing that we're currently in the middle of, and I'm curious how it will end. I assume a brand will go, I assume a brand will go too far and this will stop. But as of right now, brands are sort of in this post-Trump internet era. trying to figure out how they can insert themselves into online conversations.

And, you know, for the last, like, five years, it's actually been pretty unsafe for a brand to exist on the internet. Because everything is political. They don't want to get involved. They don't want to, like, get wrapped up in some polarizing thing. But now certain brands are being like, actually, we can be totally nuts on the internet. And people will like it. And, you know, I'm waiting for the brand that goes too far. I'm waiting for the brand that, like, I don't know, like, makes a meme about a school shooting or something.

Like, I'm waiting for the brand that just, like, completely goes all the way. And then everyone's like, okay, we can't, we can't do this anymore. Time to pull back. Yeah, exactly. And I don't know when that's going to happen, but I think we're getting close. I'm ready for it to stop. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite, unhumored me with Robert

Smigel and Friends, me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, S&L's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting. Think again. More Americans listen the podcast, then add supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers

listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think IHart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-4-4-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-844-I-Hart. What's up, fam? This Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano in our podcast point game is about defining the odds. Like LeBron heading into the playoffs without Luca and Austin Reed. And finding ways to win no matter what. He's the smartest player to ever play the game. His IQ is at a level that we've never seen before.

And he knows without Luca and Austin Reeves, I got to manipulate the game. We get a player's perspective on the challenges of the playoffs. I think Joker's going to be exhausted this series because when they don't have Rudy in the lineup, he has to really guard guys like Nas Reid. He has to guard Julius Randall. And then he has to give us everything he gives us on the night-to-night bases on offense.

And when IT's friends stop by, like Quentin Richardson, we dive into some playoff history too. Steve Nass would get that thing. That man, hell get the flying. He run up the court licking his fingers while he got the ball. Like, after you go through a training camp with that, Isaiah, you figure it out real quick. Get your ass up and down the court, and you're going to get the ball. So listen to Point Game on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you. you get your podcasts.

Hey everyone, it's Ryder Strong and Will Ferdell from PodMeets World. And now the Pod Meets Twirled podcast. We're two men who were completely clueless to reality TV, who now have covered Dancing with the Stars, traitors, and we're gearing up for the season finale of Survivor. So yeah, now we're experts. I know we annoyed a lot of our listeners by our severe lack of survivor knowledge. That is the point of the show. I'm just going to remind you, I have watched some Survivor.

I obviously haven't watched enough. Did people not like it? Like what was... Yeah. Just because we... Yeah. We'll be recapping the big conclusion in the 50th season

from the final attempts at gameplay to the desperate pleas of finalists to a bunch of... Ha, hoo. Ha ha, who. Again, we are experts. So make sure to tune into PodMeets Twirled for all our Survivor 50 takes.

Listen to PodMeets Twirl on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get right back into it. So I didn't pay very close attention to the trial when it was happening. And I think I see now that part of the reason why that is is because I had been swayed by a deliberate campaign to create doubt and fog, you know, people who weren't really paying super close attention, but who were seeing lots of content on social media about the trial.

And I also really didn't see a lot of people speaking up in support of Hurd. I just kept seeing these snippets of the trial that painted Amber Hurd in this really negative light. So I think I honestly just assumed that this must be some sort of complicated situation where the truth is somewhere in the middle. But if you look at reporting from people like journalist Michael Hobbs, who's been chronicling the trial, you can check out some of his reporting in the show description. Amber Hurd told a plausible evidence back story of abuse. So why did so many of us like me just kind of stay out of it? I have to say like I feel a little bit like guilty slash weird. I didn't really engage on this trial until pretty recently.

And I think part of it was that like probably like a lot of people, I'm kind of what you might describe as like a low information person. I didn't follow the trial. I don't really love spending time digging into like abuse and things like that. Like it's just not doesn't feel good or safe for me. And I feel like part of it is I have to admit that because of all the information I was absorbing on TikTok and Twitter and YouTube, despite the fact that I was not interested in this trial and not following it at all, it made it seem as though like, oh, like, it's a he said she said like maybe they were abusive toward each other it's so murky like just stay out of it

and I now kind of realize like I had been sort of taken by a like a campaign to make me think that to make me think like oh they're either A Amber Hurd must be a psycho lying bitch or B the story must be that like it's quote mutual abuse they both sound awful

I don't know and I guess I feel a little bit it's hard to realize the role that I personally played in carrying water for people who were interested in misrepresenting what was happening in this trial. Yeah, I mean, it's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's in the best interest of everyone involved to make you think that. It's in the best interest of platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok to make this into a larger narrative, to make this into a proxy fight. And it's in the best interest for all those people who are making that content to do that because they're making. lots and lots and lots of stupid money on it. And that's like the really sad thing is that like the viral nature of this stuff is tried directly to capital and you can make a lot of money going really viral, posting,

all kinds of breathless updates about this like very sad and weird trial, which I think is the difference between this and the OJ Simpson trial, which is that you have the role now of the individual creators who are able to jump on the bandwagon in a way that was not as easy to do in a pre-internet media landscape. Vice News reported that the Daily Wire, the conservative outlet founded by Ben Shapiro, spent between $35,000 and $47,000 on Facebook and Instagram ads promoting articles about the trial,

eliciting some 4 million impressions. According to Media Matters, these posts from the Daily Wire pages account for nearly 47% of posts about the trial from right-leading pages and nearly 18% of related posts from all news and politics pages. The content they promoted showed a clear bias against herd, some of which contained outright inaccurate information about the trial. Immediately following the verdict, Kyle Rittenhouse,

who you might remember became kind of a right-wing celebrity after traveling to Kenosha, Wisconsin with a gun in 2020, shooting and killing two protesters and was later acquitted, has already signaled that the verdict inspired him to pursue defamation charges against media who covered his case. I asked Ryan why a right-wing news site like The Daily Wire would be invested in spreading anti-amber herd messaging. What's going on there? What do you think is happening?

It's so weird because like, okay, so you hear that and you're like, okay, and a lot of people were like, we got it. We figured it out. This is all fake. No one would think this. And it's a right-wing astroturfing campaign to make people into pro-Johnny Depp supporters. And it's like, no. I went through the metrics. No one's reading the stuff that the Daily Wire is doing. None of the articles they're paying to promote are being read by anybody, which makes me, which is like even weirder to me, which is like they're so far behind the like, the Disney ladies doing like Jack Sparrow cosplay

in front of the courthouse. This is like what it seems to be what they're doing. I guess they have some kind of advertising budget they got to spend. You know, maybe it's the because of the dark money they're getting from like, you know, Republican benefactors or whatever it is. They got to spend their money.

So they're spending the money. And I think what they're trying to do with it, is like, package it in a way so that, I mean, actually, we sort of have the answer now, which is that like the day after the trial, Kyle Rittenhouse goes on Twitter. And he's like, I'm thinking about suing CNN or whoever now for defamation. And I think that's why the Daily Wire inserted themselves into this is because they want to make it really clear to other right-wing, like, activists and, you know, media companies that they can start to weaponize defamation trials in the same way. And that's why they were so, like, engaged and invested in the, uh, invested in the, you know, media companies that.

this trial. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out, like, what does this mean? Like, why would they be invested? But I do think that's part of it. And I wonder, do you think that it's part of it could also be like, I don't know, I went to the Daily Wire website just to see like what's going on? And the first thing I got before even going in was like a pop up that says, what is a woman? Like, click here to find more. And I wonder if they're like trying to seize on this like high engagement thing to get more people a lot. And I don't know, like come for the, you know, cultural thing that everybody is talking about. Stay for the like anti-trans, anti-black nonsense.

I think that's definitely true. I mean, their whole business model, their whole editorial model is like taking a thing, is like taking a thing that everyone's talking about and inserting themselves into it, hijacking it, and making it about them. And they're, they're fairly good at it. You just described like me drunk at a wedding. Yeah, exactly. They're just like, they're like the worst person you've ever met at a party. I'm not saying you are. I'm saying they are.

And they're not going to ask you any questions about yourself. They just want to talk about whatever. They want to talk about over and over again. But they did this with their freedom convoy a couple months ago, where it was happening in Canada, and the Daily Wire was largely responsible for it to start going viral in America on Facebook. And so I think that they figured that if they can find these movements early enough, they can turn up the volume for conservatives and then kick it up all the way to Fox News or whatever.

And I think that's what they tried to do with this, but I think that it was too inherently complicated, like from the fandom perspectives, for them to really, like, monopolize on it. What do you think it says about our digital ecosystem that, you know, we have this, like, kind of bogus, quote, new site that is really more of like a content platform

that just has a lot of, like, clickbait material. Like, what do you think of the fact that, like, that is seen as a viable, whether or not it was viable for them because it seems like nobody was really reading that content. But like the fact that that is seen as a strategy, what do you think it says about our digital ecosystem?

Yeah. So this is really fascinating. And I always use the Trump era as sort of a way to define this new one because we haven't figured out what we're really in yet. But this did start to happen during the Trump era, which is that all of American culture kind of flowed through Trump's tweets,

which was extremely annoying. And like, whatever what happened during the day was set by his Twitter account, then that went away. But the urge to have, like, a thing that everyone in America all fights about all day has stuck. And so trending topics now, at least in America, and in a few other countries, I've seen this too, but particularly in America, our trending topics aren't really trending topics. They're more like capture the flag. So let's say the trial, we're talking about the Depp Heard trial and it's trending. Every single community on the internet is going to try to insert themselves into that trending topic, not because they particularly care about the trial.

Maybe they do, but I'm going to guess that overwhelmingly what they really care about is attention for their particular cause, their particular advocacy, their particular community. And you see this a lot on like every side of the political spectrum. Like, for instance, like I saw a bunch of people immediately after, the Yuvaldi shooting being like, conservatives won't let women have abortions, but they will force their children to go to school and then they won't protect them when they get to school.

You know, I'm paraphrasing. And it's like, oh, but like, the abortion debate is one debate and the school shooting debate is another debate, but immediately progressive activists are like, no, these are the same debate. And it's like, but they're not. They're really not.

I mean, other than the debate of hating Republicans, which I can get behind. But, you know, like, that's how like our brains were. work now. So it's like, oh, it's the Depp Heard trial, but it's not just the Depp Heard trial. It's also the entire Me Too movement. It's also the way defamation works. It's also Kyle Rittenhouse now wants to sue the Washington Post. It's like all of this stuff has to fit the trending thing. And the Republicans are much better at it than the Democrats. You have Christopher

Rufo at the Manhattan Institute. He's the grand architect of the anti-critical race theory movement that's like spreading through small towns in America right now. And he's kind of created the playbook of like whatever's trending that day no matter what it is no matter how stupid it is like literally right now while we're talking a bunch republicans are pissing their pants over a thing that pizza hut is doing and they're pointing at pizza hut and being like this is the sign of all wokeness and it's got to go and they're really good at it they're really good at just like finding a thing on twitter and raging about it all day all week progressives liberals leftists they're not so good at it and i think it's very disorienting for people and it's supposed to be you're

supposed to feel the way you felt, which is like, I don't know what's going on. I'm just seeing everyone yelling about it. There must be a reason because they, because like conservatives in particular know that none of us have enough time to dig to the bottom of the trash heap and figure out that there's nothing there. There's nothing to talk of it. It's just, it's nonsense. But if they spew enough nonsense, they can distract us long enough to take away our voting rights. That's, that seems to be the entire game plan. Oof, that's, I mean, you really said it. And I think that like, that's exactly how I felt that. It was just like, seems like a bunch of nonsense. I don't have time to get involved.

I don't have time to have a take. I don't have time to do any investigation. I'm just going to tune it out. And yeah, I mean, I think it's like one of the results of our current internet landscape is that like it's so hard to just have a thoughtful conversation about the thing. Everything is a proxy war. Like we're no longer able to just have a thoughtful substantive conversation about abortion rights or whatever because it's like we're talking about 18 different things.

And it's like, I can understand why people are just like, nope, I'm checking out. I'm not going to follow it. It's too much. And meanwhile, we're all just so, like, heated and distracted that we're just not really able to zero in on what it's actually substantively happening. Yeah. And what's even, like, more insidious is that, like, for the most part, mainstream media disregards anything that's happening in the celebrity sphere as frivolous. Because it's typically seen as something that's either written about by women, read by women, cared about by women. You see this reaction with Kim Kardashian stuff. She's the most famous woman on earth.

She's like the Maryland rule of our time. And yet we don't take her, you know, largely she's relegated to the celebrity pages. And so what's crazy and like it's been driving me crazy watching this is that like this is one of the most like cataclysmic defamation precedence that's like ever happened in American history. Like this woman was sued over three sentences in an op-ed in the New York in the Washington Post. And no serious journalist for the capital of J is freaking out about that. that this is a massive blow to press freedom in America because now any man powerful enough to hire a legal team and set up a kangaroo court with a live stream somewhere can bully any to the fact that Kyle Rittenhouse immediately was like, yeah, I'm going to sue everybody. And because this is about two celebrities and this is about like a crazy woman and like her actor or husband or whatever, ex-husband, like no one's taking it seriously. And I think the conservatives know that really well.

They know that they can insert whatever they want because like, you know, the serious men on. CNN are going to like talk about this with the gravity that are requires, which is, which is also, you know, as I said, very insidious. I mean, it's very sad because this is scary. This is like a scary thing. Yeah. And I think you really named something that I don't think I've had language to talk about, which is that when you have people who are flooding the space,

whether it's, you know, right-wing journalists or like Disney adults on TikTok and there's not like substantive pushback or like debunking, it's just, yeah, it's, it's, it's, It's so hard to, like, basically it's like we're playing catch up, I guess. Like, the truth and the reality of what's happening is playing catch up. And it's so much harder when you have so many people who have been like really effectively changing the conversation for a long time. Yeah. And like these people don't care if they're wrong. Like they don't really care if they even understand what the trial's about.

Like they don't like, I think there's this knee jerk response from a lot of other people where they're like, okay, like if we can just like get the facts out. everyone can agree like they used to in the 90s. And it's like they didn't. You just couldn't hear them. Now you can hear them. And unfortunately, some of them can be louder than you. And so there's like we're in this really weird landscape where it's like we don't have

the illusion of cultural consensus that we had 20 or 30 years ago. We probably never did. I mean, like to find a grandparent and ask them how they feel about like a particular news event from 30 years ago, they're probably going to have a very different take than somebody else. But now it's all happening. in the same time. And certain

communities, certain political movements are better at playing with that chaos, I think, than others. And the rest of us just have to suffer because it's super annoying and very confusing. On Wednesday, the jury on the trial found that her defamed Johnny Depp in that

Washington Post piece from 2018 in which she called herself a public figure representing domestic abuse. Depp was awarded more than $10 million in damages. You know, you mentioned earlier sort of how big of a precedent this sets, and it's very scary, you know, given that we saw the verdict, just I guess was that yesterday, yeah, given that we saw the verdict yesterday that, um, heard has to, it, what did in fact libel, uh, death according to the jury, and has to pay back

more than her net worth and damages. Like, what do you see the impact being in media, in journalism? And then just, you know, generally sort of for all of us, for survivors, for the internet, like, where do you see this going? Yeah, I mean, the first thing is just, like anyone who's experienced domestic abuse, anyone who believes that they've experienced domestic abuse, just is not going to feel as confident coming forward about it. I read a statistic yesterday. I think it came from a Rolling Stone piece

about how just one advocacy group for domestic violence survivors was saying that hundreds of women immediately heard the verdict and pulled like anything to do with that charity. And they didn't want to go forward with any sort of prosecution or anything. They don't want to do it. So that's the immediate impact. And that's like that's the, that's the silent one, you know. The next one is that like we're going to see much, I think we're going to see a,

what's called a chilling effect on free speech, you know, for for the free speech warriors on the right wing, they sure don't seem to want the rest of us to speak. So, you know, the idea of an op-ed like the one that caused this trial happening again is probably much rarer now. I think a lot of the reporting that was happening around those kinds of stories won't happen the same way again. You'll need to have harder evidence, tighter reporting guidelines. There'll be more fear of retribution and things like that. And then, like, I just think that, you know, we don't really totally understand, like, what live streaming a trial does to its verdict.

And that's that kind of a more open-ended one. This was a circus. And, like, you know, in Johnny Debs' legal team, I think, sought out this particular court because they, in this particular judge, because they knew it would be an absolute circus. And, you know, the judge will probably go on to get our own TV show on some right-wing news channel. So, like, there's just no, there's no account of, there's nothing you can do because everyone involves is just in bad faith. It's just, it's a mess. I mean, it's a circus, and I know that you mean that as a figure of speech, but there were llamas.

So, I mean, like, there were llamas and people dressed like pirates and, like, there's, like, face painting going on. It was a literal circus. I mean, it's a really good, I guess. a cautionary reminder of how, like, I feel that with the injection of the internet and lots of strangers' eyes on things, we can have very good things. Like, people can really get accountability, but also it can really quickly turn the tide in ways that I think we should really be aware of. Yeah. And I don't think we know yet. I don't think we know exactly how it turns the tide or shapes public opinion yet. We know that, like, it causes chaos. We know that it, like, impacts people's

understanding of events, but we really don't know, like, long-term, like, how people will understand this. I suspect that this trial in particular will be one that's, like, studied and media courses going forward. I mean, it is the closest thing we have to, like, the internet era's OJ trial, or the Watergate hearings or something, which sounds kind of crazy to, like, elevate to that level, but so far, it's kind of as close as we've come. Unless we get the actual insurrection hearings, this is probably, like, the... big one that we're going to like study in five years. Survivors and their advocates are wondering what comes next after this precedent-setting trial.

Tarana Burke, the founder of the Me Too movement, said in a statement following the verdict, this movement is very much alive. You all want to play ping pong and have your way with the hashtag, because it doesn't mean anything to you, so you try to kill it every few months. But it means something to millions and millions of folks. It means freedom. It means community. It means safety.

It means power. You can't kill us. We are beyond the hashtag. We are a movement. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello at tangoady.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoody.com. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd.

It's a production of IHeart Radio and unbossed creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, check out the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.