Gold dust | Ep 2

Just a warning before we start, this series contains strong language and descriptions of violence. Let me tell you a story, not about amber herd or Johnny Depp, not on the face of it at least, but about an emu. The year is 2022, Emmanuel the emu, or Emmanuel Todd Lopez to give him his full name is in his prime. He's got millions of followers on TikTok, where he's become famous for his aggressive behavior and for interrupting his own as videos. He even appears on the Jimmy Fallon show. This flightless bird is a celebrity, maybe not on Johnny Depp's level, but pretty big. At a week after he's on TV, tragedy, Emmanuel suddenly dies, struck down at the height of his fame. The hashtag #RIPEmmanuel starts trending on Twitter, his fans are distraught. I wanted to marry him, but then something strange happens. The emu's owner, a woman called Taylor Blake, posts a message on Twitter. I literally sprinted out to the barn to see if it was true, Emmanuel is not dead. Emmanuel lives, resurrected from the grave. I never thought I'd learn about the global disinformation industry from an emu, but here we are. You see, Emmanuel's death was staged to prove the point by a group called Team Jorge. Team Jorge are shady contractors specialising in hacking and online disinformation, including running bot campaigns. Their operations were exposed last year by a team of international reporters who went undercover posing as clients. Team Jorge thought the reporters were legitimate clients, so they were happy to tell them about their prized asset, a piece of software able to create hundreds of fake social media profiles almost instantly. So this is a platform that we developed for online impact. Each profile had its own digital backstory that went back years, making them look completely genuine. At a click of a button, this bot army could be deployed to promote whatever message the client chose. To demonstrate just how good their tech was, Team Jorge told the reporters that they could kill off a certain well-loved internet bird called Emmanuel. They instructed their bot army to post RIP Emmanuel messages across social media. Thousands of these posts began flying across Twitter and Facebook, reaching millions of people. And it didn't take long for this fake story to be picked up and spread by real fans. Soon everyone believed that Emmanuel was dead. Who were extremely surprised by how poor they were and how the artificial intelligence was used by them and so present a great big danger for all of us. That's Laurent Rixard. He's the founder of The Bidden Stories, a non-profit group of journalists who coordinated the Team Jorge expose. This information for services is really a very lucrative business as well. It is a very, very international all and globalized market. Team Jorge were able to make a lie go viral in just a couple of clicks. It didn't take weeks of planning, the infrastructure was already in place. There's nothing linking Team Jorge to the amber herd case, but if amber was targeted by bots and trolls, this is exactly the sort of firm that would have the ability to do it. If you were able to pay some millions of dollars, then they can postpone an election, they can kill the reputation of an opponent. So this is a kind of industry we are facing now that is including more and more private actors. What was once the preserve of nation states like Russia is now everywhere. Misinformation tools are available to pretty much anyone who can afford them. And the really scary thing is that these campaigns are almost impossible to detect. If it hadn't been for LaRonde's team, the world wouldn't know anything about Team Jorge or its capabilities. But in our case, we do have reason for hope. Because 4,000 miles away in Miami, someone has been sitting on valuable evidence. This that will help us investigate whether a similar campaign was carried out against amber herd. Without any coordination, it's hard to imagine that this would have happened naturally or organically, right? I'm Alexi Monstrous, and this is Who Trolled Amber? Episode two, Gold Dust. I land in Miami in the middle of the hottest summer ever recorded. Florida is sweltering. I'm here with my producer Xavier. We're going to interview Ron Schnell, who is a computer expert who testified for amber at the trial. He was going to come on to see us on his segue because he really likes playing segue polo. But apparently the wheels are shredded, so he can't do that anymore. He said that he had been doing some work on the broader question. Was there a bot campaign against amber herd? But that he hadn't been able to speak about that at trial because by the time the trial came around, that wasn't an issue anymore. So I think that he might have, hold on, I'm just going to tell you right, I think he might have evidence about bots that he didn't present a trial and what I hope is that he's going to show us that evidence. Ron Schnell works in a swanky block in downtown Miami. Today he's a managing director for a global consulting firm specialising in issues like anti-trust law. But at his heart, Ron is a computer whiz and at that point there was like an option for you to go straight to college. Right, yes. NYU asked me when I was 14 if I wanted to become a freshman in college. It was a difficult decision for me because it would have been cool when I felt like I was ready in a way. But then I also thought, well, I like girls and what is that going to look like? And I decided it wasn't going to be good. So I decided to go to high school instead. Alongside his day job, Ron has used his computer skills to become an expert witness. He testifies in several cases a year across the US. Many of these are quite dry commercial disputes. But in August 2020, he's asked to help on the Amber Heard case. He's paid by Amber's team and that's important to note upfront. He's not a completely neutral party. But expert witnesses have a duty to be factual and when I speak to Ron, it's clear that for him, the data comes first. And before that point, had you ever heard of Amber Heard? Yes. Big fan of Pineapple Express in particular, you know. Okay. Okay. What about Johnny Depp? Do you have any opinions about him? Nope. I thought he was a great actor. So you came into it quite neutrally? Yes. And really, when I test fine court, I always come in quite neutrally and I try to remain neutral and only speak from the point of view of science. Ron comes onto the case a few months after Johnny Depp files legal papers against Amber. The actor is suing his ex-wife for $50 million, claiming that she lied about him being a domestic abuser. The truth, he says, is that it was Amber who abused him. He claims that she threw vodka bottles at him, demeaned him, kicked and punched him. He even says that Amber's allegations are lies designed to drum up publicity for her latest movie. In other words, Depp isn't just denying that he abused Amber. He's coming after her with everything he's got. But Amber doesn't take this lying down. A few months after Depp sues her, she launches her own claim against him. And that's where wrong comes in. So at that point in time, at the point when you were instructed, essentially there were two objectives. One relating to quite a narrow issue to do with statements made by Adam Maldman. Correct. And the other was quite a broad question about whether bots had been used to attack Amber heard. Right. And they were related. This next bit is a little complex, so please bear with me. Another team asks Ron to focus on two things. The first, a statement made by Johnny Depp's lawyer, a guy called Adam Maldman. Maldman is Depp's main advisor. He doesn't represent him in court, but he's a constant presence. In the lead up to the trial, Maldman tells journalists that Amber's claims of domestic abuse are a hoax. Ron is asked to look at whether these statements stirred up online hatred against Amber. So to answer that question, he downloads this huge database of tweets. Almost a million messages posted in the two years before the trial, all containing anti-amber heard hashtags. Ron maps that data against the statements made by Adam Maldman, and he finds that thousands of tweets' trashing Amber were posted just after Maldman called her a liar. That's good for Amber's case. And he finds something else too, something I find really odd. There were total of over 1.2 million tweets with the negative hashtags, and there were 224,194 that mentioned Waldman, 96,181 that mentioned Waldman young. A huge number of the anti-amber tweets mention Adam Waldman by name or by his nickname. I found that 25% of the negative hashtag tweets mentioned one or the other. 25% of all the negative tweets posted about Amber heard using the hashtag, 25% 1 in 4 mentioned this lawyer. That's right. That's surprising. I'd say yes, it was pretty surprising. This part of Amber's counterclaim, the bit about the Waldman statements went all the way to trial. But there was another part that didn't make it, an allegation that Depp's team launched a global bot campaign against Amber. A judge struck out that part of the counterclaim more than a year before the hearing. But by then, Ron had already done a couple of months work on this question too. Like he wasn't allowed to talk about on the stand. One of the things that Ron did was run all the Twitter accounts he collected through a bot detection program called Botometer. You can see here that I'm just looking at the screen now that at least the first 40, maybe more have a higher than 90% chance that they are bots. When I talked to him over the phone, he wasn't willing to divulge the results. But now I'm here in front of him, he's more ready to talk. Ron says he identified significant numbers of bots tweeting about Amber. It's also when you look at, even if you just spot check some of these tweets, the wording is conspicuously exactly the same. So that's also something really interesting to look at. If you put Adam Waldman aside, clearly this is a huge number of tweets. Without any coordination, it's hard to imagine that this would have happened naturally or organically. This appears to be some sort of organized attack. At that moment, my producer, Xavier, jumps in. Can I ask you one, is that in terms of scale or the suddenness of it? Is it the fact that it happened? I would say it's both scale and suddenness. It's not something you typically see organically. So if you, could we now go to the war? Ron thinks there probably was an organized attack against Amber. But he's not 100% sure. The counterclaims dismissal stopped him before he could complete his research. If this is a marathon, I'd say he's run the first five miles. But Ron is happy to help us finish the race. He's giving us his database of anti-Amber her tweets. And this is Gold Dust. Since Elon Musk took over Twitter in 2022, he's basically prevented researchers and journalists from downloading large quantities of data. And even if we could download a similar number of tweets today, lots of the accounts which were tweeting back then have since been deleted or suspended. Ron's data set is like a layer of sediment, perfectly preserving the fossils of internet hate towards Amber. And he's got the only copy. And do you mind if we go off and do our own digging and then come back and show you what we've found? No, that sounds great, I'd be very interested. We leave Ron's office excited about the data he's given us. We've got a whole new hard drive. So I think that we need to find a way of analyzing those files. But we know we don't have the skills to examine it properly. We need an expert, a specialist, someone who can help us search these tweets for clues about who trolled Amber. I'm anxious to get back to London so I can start looking, but I don't want to leave America quite yet. There's one other person I want to see. And then yeah, I think we just need to kind of step up speaking to people, other witnesses in the trial who might know something about the social media campaign. As we leave the city, we pass under some gleaming skyscrapers and I notice this huge billboard with Johnny Depp's face on it. It's an advert for an aftershave called 'Savage' by Christian Dior. Depp has been the face of the fragrance since 2015. Despite a British judge finding that Depp had abused his ex-wife Amber heard on 12 occasions, Dior stood by him. In fact, just months before we flew out to the US, Depp signed a new $20 million deal to extend his Dior contract for another three years. The tagline of the fragrance is 'Savage' wild at heart. It's quite a bullsy slogan for an alleged domestic abuser. And for me, it's hard to see this sign and not think of Amber herself. She used to have a similar contract with L'Oreal, another beauty company. She no longer has that contract. Now, Depp fans would say this is all fair enough. Depp may have lost the UK case in 2020, but he won in the US two years later. Naturally, that's got to mean something. I'm not in a position to say whether Johnny Depp abused Amber or not. I know a lot about the case, but I wasn't in court every day. Even though the British judgement against Depp is compelling, I have to respect the facts that a US jury came to another conclusion. I've always been interested in something different. Whether the jury's decision was right, but whether it was fair. If Ron's initial conclusions are correct and some of the hapes came from bots and trolls, could that have deprived Amber of a fair trial? And if it did, is it right that Johnny Depp's name is still in lights while Amber has all of it disappeared? We've flown north to Jackson Hole, a rodeo town in the heart of Wyoming. In the mountains on my right, kind of silhouetted against the sky, and even though I'm on a road with other cars, it kind of feels like a least polluted place in the world. It might be in the middle of nowhere, but Jackson Hole is something. of a Hollywood enclave. Next to two national parks, the likes of Kanye West and Harrison Ford have sprawling estates in the area. Hey. Hello. Hi. Hi. Thanks so much for having us. Oh sure. Come on in. Wow. You guys have made a long trip. Hi. Nice to meet you too. This is amazing. Well, welcome to our home. Wyoming. How cool. Hollywood is 100% a relationship business. It's it's all about who you know and the long-standing relationships that you create and the trust that you create. I'm here to see Catherine Arnold, a Hollywood producer who spent decades in the industry. She has this beautiful house with these enormous glass windows. Yeah. I was hoping the most will come. How often do you see them on the CCTV or like? No, we just look up there and they're right there. And they're right there. Right there. Like Ron Chnell, Catherine was an expert witness for Amber Heard. So initially I was hired to defend Johnny's claim that Amber's op-ed piece had caused him damages to the amount of about 50 million dollars. Whether that was caused by the loss of pirates of the Caribbean or any other work that he may have gotten in that time period. And then about a year and a half later, Amber made a counter claim against Johnny for the damages that she had incurred since the intense social media onslaught, negative onslaught against her. I was hired to analyze what her career trajectory would have been if that campaign had not ensued. Depp claims that Amber's piece in the Washington Post made him a pariah in Hollywood, but Catherine isn't convinced. It had a new cycle of less than 48 hours. Most people didn't even know about the op-ed. Most people hadn't read the op-ed. The executives at the studios hadn't read the op-ed. She says Depp's problems started way earlier. Issues prior to the op-ed had affected Johnny's career, the drinkings and being late to said. Depp's lawyers dispute these claims, but this is his former agent, Tracy Jacobs. Late to said, consistently, on virtually every movie, I would get yelled at. I never said to him, "You're a difficult client," but I was very honest with him and said, "You've got to stop doing this. This is hurting you." And it did. By the time Depp sues Amber, he's still a global superstar, but there are questions about his work ethic. Amber doesn't have the same pulling power as Depp, but she's recently landed the role of a lifetime. After appearing in a bunch of indie movies, including a stoner comedy called Pineapple Express, she's cast in Aquaman, a proper Hollywood blockbuster. You know, after Aquaman, she had a really big moment. She had this high moon period where everybody was looking at her, what is she going to do next? The directors had raved about her performance. The producers had raved about her performance. She was part of the billion dollar movie. Aquaman is a huge deal. It becomes the highest-grossing DC Comics film ever. It should make Amber a star, but there's something else dragging her down to earth. Online hate. It starts when she files the restraining order against Depp in 2016, but it reaches a fever pitch four years later when Depp loses his case in London. A few days after the verdict, Warner Bros. removes the actor from the fantastic beast's franchise. The internet goes into overdrive. Thousands of accounts accuse the studio of punishing an innocent man, an online petition calling for Amber to be removed from Aquaman's sequel attracts millions of signatures. It's a lot of noise and Hollywood, it notices. When she had promoted other movies prior to Aquaman 2, she was on the cover of magazines around the world. There was no press done on her for Aquaman 2. She wasn't allowed to go to any of the big media events that the other actors were taking to she wasn't on the posters. Amber's role in Aquaman 2 is drastically cut. She's not even in the trailer. I don't know if studio executives believed what they read online about how Amber was crazy, about how it was Amber who was the abuser, but in a place where reputation is king, they do think it's a problem and Amber feels the impact. She couldn't get an audition, she couldn't get a reading, she couldn't directors and casting directors and producer was saying we can't touch Amber right now, it's just too noisy around her and no one would hire her. The trolling continues today. Amber is living in Spain far away from Hollywood trying to rebuild her career through small independent movies. But hold on, there's lots of reasons why a star can fall out of favor. Maybe Amber wasn't a fantastic actor or maybe she had a bad reputation on set. And then another Hollywood source hands me some emails, emails from agents, producers and managers. And they seem to confirm what Catherine's telling us. He confidentially told his agent that he can't go anywhere near her now with what's going on in the press and with Johnny. She's losing so many opportunities, I only find out a fraction of them. Emails explicitly saying we can't touch her, there's too much noise. We can't bring her name up right now. Too much negativity around her. I'm also passed an email from Amber herself, confirming that Aquaman's studio Warner Bros. banned her from posting about the film. After speaking to Catherine and seeing those leaked emails, I think it's fair to say that online hate did affect Amber's career, even if it might not have been the only factor. But could it have led to an unfair trial? I think potentially it could. The online campaign against Amber heard was relentless, literally millions of tweets insulting and demeaning her, undermining and distorting her testimony in real time. As I mentioned in the last episode, the US jury weren't sequestered. They could go home after the trial every night, talk to their families, they could easily have looked up what was happening online, even if they weren't supposed to. And that's not the only thing. Amber received thousands of online threats during the trial. People want to kill me and they tell me so every day. And so did her witnesses. Amber's psychologist received death threats which were deemed credible by the FBI. And I know that other people were put off from testifying all together. Even Catherine got trolled while she was giving evidence. It happened fairly immediately. So there's two parts of any experts' testimony. One, you're on direct, which is when your side's lawyers are questioning you. And then there's cross-examination. And that's when the other side's lawyers start questioning you. And in this case, because it was so long, I had a break between direct and cross. When I got off from direct, and I went over to my phone to look and see if there were any messages, I saw an onslaught of people making all kinds of strange accusations and comments. And I was very surprised. It was really ugly, personal comments about my looks, about my health, about my experience level. They used a lot of really foul language, both online and text, and to my voicemail on my cell phone. Catherine won't say it herself, but I've seen some of the comments made against her. They're pretty disgusting. So here's what we have. An unsacquested jury, witness intimidation, the trolling of experts in real time, all in a major case with millions of dollars on the line. I think this case was tried in the court of public opinion more than it was tried in the legal system, and that's my experience of this trial. I leave Wyoming with a much better sense of how online attacks against Amber impacted her life, and how they might even have denied her a fair trial. The question now is, how much of that hate was manufactured? Savonite land back in the UK, armed with Ron's database. We focus on finding someone to look at all those preserved tweets. It's easier said than done. The pool of people actually capable of digging into such a large file is depressingly small. A few researchers don't even want to touch the story. They think it's too controversial that they might get attacked if they get involved. But eventually, we strike lucky. Twice. Based on their behavior, so they're all bots, what we call a coordinated inauthentic behavior. Across the whole data set, I think at least 50% of tweets were generated by inauthentic accounts. Next time on Who Trolled Amber, we uncover a global campaign. All of those accounts look suspicious. That's a typical bad behavior. I think it's another percent in authentic. And we start looking for culprits. It's actually fundamentally anti-depocratic. You might actually be able to narrow down who's running this. We contacted Johnny Depp while making this podcast, but he didn't respond. Thank you for listening to Who Trolled Amber. Who Trolled Amber is written and reported by me, Alexi Monstrous, and by Xavier Greenwood. The producer is Xavier Greenwood, additional reporting by Katie Riley. Sound design is by Carla Patella. The narrative editor is Gary Marshall. The editor is David Taylor. If you're enjoying the series, please take a moment to give it a rating and recommend it to your friends and family. It really does make a difference.