I don’t know what I was expecting when I started to listen to the first episode of Who Trolled Amber?, a new podcast from the impressive Tortoise Media. But I didn’t expect to end up in Saudi Arabia, learning about Jack Sparrow’s bromance with Prince Mohammed bin Salman. I also didn’t expect to be examining my own failure to pay attention to a trial that has so greatly impeded, if not actively reversed, the progress made by the MeToo movement around sexual assault.
Who Trolled Amber? comes from Alexi Mostrous, Tortoise’s head of investigations, whose previous audio endeavours include the award-winning Sweet Bobby and Hoaxed. Mostrous is clearly concerned with the digital world and its evolution into a semi-lawless realm of unchecked aggression, active trolling and wild misinformation.
Who Trolled Amber? is a six-part investigation of a hunch that the surge in interest in the Depp vs Heard libel case of 2022 was not entirely organic. The man who had the hunch, a former Canadian spy called Daniel Mackey, passed it on to Mostrous.
The journalist doesn’t care much for celebrities, but his interest was piqued when he spoke to friends who all had a negative opinion of Heard, without having watched the trial. Had the bots Mackey talked about had an effect? And who might have set them in motion? Mostrous began to dig.
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You likely already know a lot of what’s covered here: in 2022 Johnny Depp sued his ex-wife Amber Heard for defamation following a Washington Post article she wrote about domestic abuse. The jury found in his favour, despite the fact that she never named Depp in the piece.
Mostrous reminds us that, just two years earlier, an English judge had come to a different conclusion. When in 2020 Depp sued the Sun newspaper for calling him a “wife beater”, he lost the case, after the presiding judge found that what the newspaper had printed was “substantially true”.
So what was different the second time around? An online fervour of monumental proportions had been stirred up, where posts on Twitter and TikTok denigrating Heard took over people’s feeds, yes, but this had happened to some extent in the run-up to the English case too. The US case was being adjudicated by a jury, however, and they were not sequestered during the trial.
Who Trolled Amber? is a case study in dogged journalism, with Mostrous and the Tortoise team poring through data, tracking down interviews and following leads in what seems like an impossible endeavour to answer the titular question. The result is a staggering and nuanced revelation of how bots work on social media and on society, the disturbing ease with which they can be employed, and how to find out who is behind them.
As Who Trolled Amber? makes clear, there’s no clean answer: this is a messy, multifaceted affair, and fingers point in more than one direction. But if you weren’t concerned before this about just how easy it is for someone – a foreign interest or a nefarious actor – to place their finger on the scale of public opinion, you will be now.
Mostrous does an expert job of persuading us that the messy legal proceedings between an ageing actor and his much younger ex-wife speak volumes about what can happen when we, as sapped and scrolling beings, give away our attention.
