Posts about Depp v. Heard
I know the author, Charlotte Allen, slightly. We have mutual Facebook friends and used to share a blogging platform. We disliked each other cordially, but my hat is off to her for this article, Scenes from a Marriage (quillette.com), published this past January 18. Until reading it, I had no idea how specactular an upset the trial really was:
To try to understand what had happened, I spent the summer watching the Depp-Heard trial on YouTube. Poring over the hours of trial testimony did not convince me of the misogyny of the jury or the American legal system. It did, however, lead me to appreciate the strategic brilliance of Depp’s lawyers, who methodically constructed their case like an edifice of architecture.
It's long, but not pointlessly so. To frame the jury trial as a surprise win for common sense, Allen opens with a long cortege of quotes from outraged MSM pundits, including Michelle Goldberg and Amanda Hess, who, until June, 2022, were understood to represent the voice of reason.
A common retort about public opinion siding with Johnny Depp was that everyone fell for a bot smear campaign. Bots did not have anything to do with what happened inside the court room. The people most susceptible to social media manipulation and misinformation are actually those who didn't watch the trial, but instead relied on headlines, articles and online posts. But where did the bot allegation come from and was it supported by credible data?
Let's start with this tweet from a newly created account in February 2020:
https://i.imgur.com/ZbIPTxA.png
It was posted days after the Daily Mail released the first audio. This tweet will become a foundation for multiple articles accusing Depp of social media manipulation using bots.
The first of these articles came in the middle of the UK trial from The Guardian. Aided by a report from Bot Sentinel, this tweet was cited as a proof of an "autonomous bot". The article included additional commentary from a lawyer and a politician, but not from other infosec experts or data analysts.
Adam Waldman posted an email screenshot of a Times UK reporter inquiring about a "report compiled by experts for Amber Heard." The article said that Kaplan Hecker & Fink, a law firm that formerly represented Heard, "asked" Bot Sentinel to assess if the actress "had been a victim of an ongoing targeted harassment and smear campaign".
Neither of the articles mentioned the name of the account, nor did their reporters scrutinize the allegation. The account had a low tweet frequency, it received little traction, and didn't tag or send any replies to the Heard's twitter account. The tweet itself had 2 likes according an archive.org snapshot. Another Twitter user posted discrepancies about the claim in this thread.
The Times UK noted the report "identified 13 active inauthentic accounts" but left out that it was only 1.7% of the total amount Bot Sentinel analyzed. The Guardian article was silent about the number entirely. Both articles ignored the implication that the other 98.3% of accounts analyzed were likely from organic activity being supportive of Depp or critical of Heard.
Both articles didn't directly mention Amber Heard's legal team paid Bot Sentinel for this report. The disclosure would come up a year later in a Discovery+ documentary from Bot Sentinel's owner, Christopher Bouzy.
One question remains, what evidence and metrics were used to confidently label the account as a bot? Even the term "autonomous bot" is another conundrum as the phrase is commonly used in robotics. It's different from automated posting which can be done by the use of scripts or management tools like Tweetdeck, Sprinklr or Buffer. But these inconsistencies didn't seem to raise any red flags by other reporters who recently republished Bot Sentinel's claims.
After the UK Trial ended, Heard filed her counterclaims on August 10, 2020.
To further aid her case, she subpoenaed Twitter to provide details, including IP addresses, of 200 suspected accounts. You would think that the "autonomous bot" account quoted in The Guardian article would surely be on that list. It wasn't.
Heard claimed that the listed accounts were connected either to Depp or his agents. The common thing linking those accounts was they openly praised Adam Waldman on Twitter. There were also claims that the targeted harassment was Russian in origin. It was based on Waldman's role as a lobbyist for Oleg Deripaska and tweets with "Cyrillic signatures". However, the same document also yielded that these accounts were not directly traceable to Depp. And the Cyrillic alphabet is not unique to Russia but also used by other countries like Belarus and Ukraine.
Twitter was subpoenaed to produce Waldman's tweets & direct messages (page 8). Since he doesn't have a setting that let others DM him on Twitter (he replies to public tweets) any direct messages would imply Waldman was the one initiating contact, allegedly orchestrating a botting operation or coordinating with Twitter users.
However months before this subpoena, Waldman was inviting others to contact him instead on Instagram, not Twitter. Based on the US trial in 2022, he communicated with some individuals via phone and a privacy app Signal, which he had been using as early as 2017. If Heard wanted communications between Waldman and Depp supporters, why didn't she subpoena Instagram or Signal instead?
In publicly available court files, Heard was only seeking Adam Waldman's tweets & DMs. But behind paywalled documents, Heard also requested information of well over 200 different Twitter accounts.
A second subpoena filed on September 30, 2020, Heard asked Twitter to hand over the following:
IP Address from which the account is registered
Any and all IP addresses from which account logged in
Any and all IP addresses from which the account tweeted messages
If the account was ever suspended, the reason given for each suspension
Device information where the tweet was sent
Heard's lawyers argued they weren't looking to unmask anonymous users. However, an IP address and device ID is considered personal identifying information. They can be used to reveal people behind their accounts. User data can be cross-referenced with third-party datasets. And there are companies who specialize in such services.
On November 10, 2020 Twitter lawyers objected to the request:
They argued that "requests are unduly intrusive and burdensome where they ... request confidential information [] and appear to be a broad fishing expedition for irrelevant information."
Twitter further stated:
IP address information can be used to unmask anonymous users. Equipped with this data, Defendant can subpoena the relevant Internet Service Provider (ISP) for the identity of the individual or entity related to each IP address.
The requests were denied and Twitter wasn't compelled to hand over any user data.
Heard didn't need to go through the trouble of unmasking anonymous Twitter users by their IP addresses. Months before the Twitter subpoenas were even filed, some users were already exposed. Names, addresses, and contact numbers of users and their relatives were already known by a reporter who was followed by Heard's lawyer on Twitter. No article came out of this investigation. However two years later, their personal information reached other reporters who were more willing to publicize it instead.
Some media outlets also wrote about comparing the Depp v Heard lawsuit to Devin Nunes' case. Nunes got a lot of criticism from the press for going after his Twitter critics. Heard got none because media outlets didn't publish it. Instead some reporters moved to slant the same users sharing court documents and evidence online.
The only reason the public knew about the 200 Twitter user subpoena was because someone purchased the document and shared it to everyone - for free. Unfortunately, it's the same user whose identity and family members were also recently exposed. The optics seem to imply that when the legal efforts to invade user privacy failed, the next move was to justify it under newsworthiness instead.
The initial evidence used to perpetuate bots manipulating social media was insufficient and unvetted. From afar it looked like a strategy to use a national security issue in order to discredit, intimidate and silence people publicly investigating the case. Without them, the media narrative would have remained one sided and unchallenged. Without them, talking points would've won over case facts.
