Through the looking glass | Ep 4

Just a warning before we start, this series contains strong language and descriptions of violence. Okay, we're going to go right and show what happened here. This is what it seems like, then it's really scary because it shows that these campaigns don't just affect celebrities, they could happen to anyone and that is quite disconcerting. Yeah, yeah. I've come back to Florida with my producer Xavier. We're in a place called Tampa Bay. We're here to meet a man called Chris Heron. It's about as far away from Johnny Depp and Hollywood as you can get. Chris lives out in the suburbs. He's got a big house on one of those streets I recognise from pretty much any 80s American high school movie. Manicured lawns, flag poles flying the stars and stripes, basketball hoops on the grass. Chris used to have a very normal life here with his wife Cheryl and his sons Cameron and Tristan. We came from Virginia. We got tired of the snow. The boys were young. They were in first grade in kindergarten and we said we're not leaving. Fast forward, 18 years and the Cameron thing happened. It was not called the accident. Today he lives in the house alone. We love it. The boys love it. Not so much anymore. Cameron doesn't. I don't think he'll live here anymore. He'll come back. Chris has got this tan face and sandy blonde hair. In his bore shorts and t-shirt he looks like any other off-duty dad. But when I talk to him he's worn and nervous. But look I mean I'd like let's make this as relaxed as possible. He speaks quietly and the tension shows in his face in his mannerisms. He fidgets, taps the table, sometimes contradicts himself. And he has good reason to feel a bit broken because his son Cameron is in jail and he'll be there for a long time. Cameron is the reason we're in Tampa Bay. I first read about him on the website of the local newspaper the Tampa Bay Times. And that felt appropriate because Cameron's story is the archetypal local news story. But it didn't stay local. Something happened to upend the family's life in a way that they could never have predicted. I call him my Alice in Wonderland life since it started. After months of investigation Xavier and I are now much closer to understanding what happened to Amber Heard. Joe Han and Kai Cheng the data experts have told us the bots and trolls played a significant role in driving the hate towards her. According to Joe Han more than half of all anti-amber Heard tweets he looked at came from inauthentic accounts. But we're still stuck on the question of who who could have commissioned these accounts to attack her. Daniel Mackey the former spy told me to look for other cases where bots may have played a part. I'm hoping that what happened to Cameron will give me new insight into what happened to Amber. I'm Alexey monstrous and this is who trolled Amber episode 4 through the looking glass. Cameron's very free spirit. It always thought Rick's taker excelled at Taekwondo, excel at paintball. He was getting ready to go to England with a buddy. They'd already booked the flight. I got his passport. He was big into working out, lifting weights and he got just huge. He'd just graduated high school the week before. We'd just gone through graduation ceremony. We got him in the car the most thing. I didn't think anything of it. It's just a car to me. The year is 2018 and Cameron Heron is 18 years old. He's about to go to college but he's got one last summer hanging out with his best friend John and his brother Tristan. Him and John, we're going to go with lift weights. John was late to our house. Cameron begged Tristan over and over to go with him. Tristan said no, no, no, no. Tristan finally came in, I think just to give in to his brother. They took off. I said be careful and I was getting ready to go get my haircut and the phone rang. I mean this wasn't, it couldn't have been more than god. 20 or 30 minutes. It was instantaneous to me how fast the phone call happened and it was Cameron and I dropped it because I pulled it on my pocket. I didn't have a good handle on and I dropped it and it went straight down to the cement and hung up. I just dialed it back and I handed it to my wife and I said I'm going to go get the keys and all I heard him was screaming. I didn't couldn't understand one word he said, just massive blood-curdling screaming. He knew something was wrong. Bad. So I ran out, got the keys. I was telling him he got there, everything was gone. There was no ambulance, no fire truck, no nothing. We got to even go up to the boys because all three of them, they'd sat him in a triangle and in between the roads. Cameron was on his hands and knees. I got ridden his face. He didn't know who I was. Got ridden in Tristan's face. Didn't know who I was. They wouldn't even answer me. They were completely catatonic. It was like I wouldn't even there. I was invisible to all three of them. The only thing out was the boys car and they were parked side by side like they pulled up to a grocery store and the baby carers out in front of like in between them about 20 feet in front of him. Cameron Herring drives his Ford Mustang at 102 miles an hour down a boulevard a few blocks from his house. He's racing his friend John. At that moment a young mother and her 21-month-old daughter crossed the street. I can't get him ever to him or his brother to say anything. I get him up to the accident scene right before impact and they shut down. Cameron tries to break but it's too late. This was the scene along Tampa's busy Bayshore boulevard after mom and daughter were hit while crossing the street. Lilia was in her stroller. No mangle. The driver who allegedly hit a woman on Bayshore boulevard was street racing. His name is Cameron Herring. The baby didn't die until Friday morning when he took her off life support. The mother died from what I remember. I think it was a Wednesday night that evening. A mother and her baby both dead. The story leads the local news for weeks but for the moment it doesn't go much further than Tampa. To be honest that's not that surprising. Thousands of Americans die in car crashes each year and sure the hair in case is more newsworthy than most you can see instantly how it can be framed. A spoiled rich kid in a fast car who kills a mother and child. But it's still a familiar story. Nothing too out of the ordinary. There's little to suggest it won't die out in a month or two. Fast forward to 2021 the middle of the COVID pandemic. Cameron has pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide and unlawful racing. He sentenced to 24 years in jail. The victim's family feels like justice has been done. Although this won't bring my wife back I hope that this sentence will inspire younger folks to behave in a manner that is appropriate. Legal guidelines in Florida suggest that Cameron should get somewhere between 18 and 30 years in prison. So by that account 24 years is roughly in the middle. But for Cameron's dad the sentence is devastating. Oh I was furious. I was livid. I wanted to just go out and I mean you know ring someone's neck and did you know what Cameron's reaction to to the verdict was? He sure looks stunned to me. I can tell you is that looking his face. For me I don't know what to think. On the one hand Cameron stopped at the scene he didn't try and run away. He pleaded He did guilty and he's always expressed remorse. - I'm going to read on behalf of Cameron Heron. I am so sorry for what I did and what I caused. God is with these two beautiful souls and I have no doubt that they are at peace. - Then again, Cameron's recklessness directly led to the death of a mother and child. - When I hear about this and each year, I'll wake up with screams in the middle of the night for a few months. We're going out three years and we hear those screams. They can comfort their child. They can go to them and hug them. I go to a closet and sniff a t-shirt. I go to a baby picture and stroke her cheeks to comfort her. - I can see why people wanted him to go to jail for a long time. Not long after he sentenced, Cameron Heron launches an appeal. His lawyers argue that he should get 10 years in prison, not 24. And it's around this time that things start to get a bit weird. - I mean, he got sentenced in April of that year and then by July 4th, so just six weeks later, it was out of control. Completely out of control. People harassing us, getting our number and constantly calling us, you know, they would start calling us like midnight. And they'd all be overseas numbers. They just wanted to express the support for Cameron. - I love him around the world and I don't know if there are bots, but it went on and on and on every night. - The case of Cameron Heron goes global. Thousands of people suddenly seem very interested. Some even turn up at Chris's door. - A complete stranger, wanting to help us. And then the next day, another one came. And that's when we're coming to go and share all. We are something weird happening. I don't know what it is, but. - But most of the interest is firmly rooted in social media. An army of accounts starts tweeting in support of Cameron Heron, calling for his sentence to be reduced. - Justice for Cameron Heron. - Cameron Heron is a man who confessed to a crime he didn't commit. - And put her daughter's life in danger. - On Twitter and TikTok, on Facebook and Instagram, Cameron's story blows up. - Instead of being treated like a man who's killed two people, Cameron is faded as a celebrity. - Here are some of the comments. Poor boy, I hope they will forgive him. He looks innocent. He didn't do it on purpose. - It was an accident. He doesn't deserve that. This one. You're too cute. I fell in love with the criminal. - There are videos of him in court with comments about how amazing his blue eyes look. - Blue is my favorite color. - May I ask why? - Because reminds me the ocean, the sky and those eyes. There are broken heart emojis and images of Cameron set to the song "Criminal" by Britney Spears. Some online supporters say he's too cute to spend so long in jail. People even use AI to mimic his voice. - I am Cameron Heron and during my teenage years, I developed a love for cars and racing. But a lot of these posts go beyond mere support. Some are pretty vicious. They attack the Florida governor, Rhonda Santos, the prosecution team, anyone connected with the case. Most disturbingly, they even troll the family of the woman who Cameron killed. - These are the jinx who destroyed the life of an innocent person, accusing and slandering him because of their jealousy, hatred and greed in their hearts. Hashtag Jessica died by suicide. - That's pretty cool, right? - Jessica was drunk and crossed the street illegally. So Jessica was the young mother that was killed. - Every unjust has an end, skull, skull. That's from Amanda 67M. - Karma is coming to you, Hubbard. - Who's Hubbard? - It's just at DA, that prosecutor, Cameron. Karma is coming to you, Hubbard. You will never survive God's punishment. - All the Cameron accounts have one basic message, that the case is a miscarriage of justice, that Cameron didn't mean to kill anyone, that he doesn't deserve to go to prison. And the scale of the campaign is staggering. On TikTok, the Hashtag Cameron Heron has 2.8 billion views. Just for context, justice for Johnny Depp got 20 billion views on TikTok. But Depp is a global superstar, not some unknown kid from a small city in Florida. And here's why that's really interesting. Because I don't think Cameron's case went viral by accident. I think that someone or some group made it go viral. In the Depp case, I found it quite hard to tell whether some of the suspicious accounts I was seeing were bots, or just really enthusiastic fans. But in Cameron's case, the bots are far more obvious. - Heron Army, Cameron Heron. - Cameron Coil Heron. - Well, that's just middle name. - Cameron Heron official. - No, that doesn't look official to me. - They have generic names like Cameron Heron 16 or Camcam 55. Many have almost no followers. They post hundreds of times a day, and only about Cameron Heron. Some use AI to generate fake profile photos. But the most surprising thing about these bots is that many of them seem to come from one part of the world, the Middle East. - Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bahrain. I'm just one of the ones I remember. Saadi. - Saadi, right there. - Saadi, yeah, all over. - I just told Cameron I said, "Your life's going to be a weird life when you get out of that place." I said, "You've got to be somewhere in the hide." And the Middle East is not it. Chris and I scroll through some of these accounts. We find hundreds of bots tweeting an Arabic or broken English, pumping out identical messages in support of Cameron. Many have their locations set to somewhere in the region, but Chris also shows me some accounts which seem to be in two places at once. There's one account called Cameron Heron 24 that tweets primarily in English. One day, it posts a message from Jedda in Saudi Arabia. Three minutes later, it switches location and starts tweeting from Florida. This account is pretending to be from Cameron's home state, perhaps to give the impression of local support. But it's not doing a very good job. Just like in the debt case, inauthentic accounts supporting Cameron, don't operate in a silo. And real people start to take the bait. A genuine fan club springs up in support of the convicted teenager. Chris starts getting late-night phone calls, constant text messages, letters sent from around the world. A lot of it is the Middle East supporters. If I blew them off a day, they immediately attack me. God's going to strike me down, stuff like this. I just laughed at it, like, oh great, in what format would they attack you? Text messages. Really? Text messages, watch out. Can I ask what the day was? They want to know everything about Cameron. Anything and everything. The messages keep coming, day after day after day. You can tell this from the Middle East, the way they write it. And when they call us Mama and Daddy Heron. Really? Is that like, they call us to my day? He shows me an enormous pile of fan mail. I have loved your son since the day I met him and went nothing but the best for him. God bless you and your wonderful and your beautiful family. Please, here's my email if you'd like to talk and chat. Why, you don't know me and I don't know you. I felt the need to write. I ask Chris why he thinks his son's case caught fire, first on social media and then in real life. Your guess is a good mind, Alexie, but I'm, oh God. I know this is going to sound vain. I think it's his eyes. Something I can come up with. To me, that's implausible. Cameron is an attractive young man and, yes, hundreds of real supporters have reached out to both him and to Chris. But that doesn't explain why literally thousands of fake accounts based in the Middle East were set up to advocate for Cameron's case. It seems obvious that someone commissioned these accounts to support him. I spent four years online on undercover and various different roles targeting Eastern European hackers originally and then I was targeting members of Al Qaeda. EJ Hilbert is a former FBI agent. He's seen plenty of disinformation campaigns and he thinks the heroin case is a clear example. If you wanted to be a high quality, it would have had to have been Florida residents talking about it in Florida. That's the only way it was going to happen. By using groups outside of Florida, it immediately looked like manipulation. EJ says that a lot of disinformation firms are based in the Middle East in countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. His theory is that one of these firms was paid to support Cameron online and he doesn't think it would have cost a lot of money. There was one instance where somebody was asking me about the exact same stuff. How did this get escalated around the world, blah, blah, blah, how was it coming from everywhere? And they said, well, we talked to the individual and they said, I don't have the kind of money that it would cost to do that, to get people to do that. And I said, so they don't have a hundred bucks. Because honestly, that's all it takes. For EJ, there's only one question in the hair in case. Who paid them? First thought was somebody, somewhere, probably a friend that was the same age as him understood something, knew how to get followers, knew how to get tweets, how to get stuff like that. I don't think it was his lawyer. I don't think it was his family. They probably didn't. Some would argue, you know, he had this super fast car. I don't tell me you don't have money to pay for this type of stuff. Don't think of this always as the fariest manipulation, all right? Think of it as, in certain cases, people thinking that they're helping. Chris unsurprisingly insists that he had nothing to do with commissioning bots. The accusation was that you or someone in Cameron's team had paid for the botly false. Absolutely false. Good Lord. I can barely get on my email. You kidding me? I want to create a bot thing. He doesn't seem to have a great grasp of social media. The only time I went on TikTok, sorry about that, they would all write me, as I was doing the live TikTok thing, they'd all write me, they'd write questions. I've never done TikTok, so it was all new to me. I really need to speak to Cameron, and then, as if by magic, you're a current balance is 20, 1, 2, 3, and I have to reload it every like three days, you call me so much. That's humanitarian and recording. Thank you for using GPL. Thank you. How are you doing? Well, you don't sound too great, it's a problem. After a bit of two and fro, Chris passes me the phone. How are you doing? I'm okay, I mean, I don't know how to explain it overwhelmed if it's probably the best term to use. Yeah. How are you doing? Yeah, we're okay, yeah, yeah, we're okay. Our particular focus is on the social media campaign that resulted after you were sentenced. It's really kind of extraordinary. I just would be really interested to know what you thought about it. Oh, well, I mean, at first, it was cool, I guess, but then as it progressed, it kind of evolved, it was on mom. Right. We couldn't really control it no matter what we did. Now it's just, I don't even know what to call it. Do you think it's become kind of more of a burden than a help? Honestly, yeah, yeah, I would say so. Yeah. What do you think of the fact that so many accounts originate in the Middle East? What do you think is going on? I don't really know about it. You know, I thought it was hard too. Is what's happening online part of the reason why you're feeling quite overwhelmed at the moment? Yes, yes, I think that 80% of us overwhelm us back from time to time. Ninety percent of the reason why you're feeling overwhelmed comes because of what's happening online. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. Even the guards recognize me all the time like, hey, I just saw you on Snapchat last night or Twitter, Instagram, and it's almost like a weekly basis, and some of them really hate me for it, others are really kind of, I guess you could say Starstruck. It's like, hey, you're that guy, I'm like, yeah, that's me, sadly. Do you think that anyone connected to you, even maybe without your knowledge, might have paid for bots or trolls to support your case? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. You do. I would agree with that. You do think so. Cameron thinks that someone close to him paid for Middle Eastern bots, but he doesn't have any idea who, or if he does, he's not going to tell me over the phone. I don't want to take up any more of his time. Do you want me to pass you quickly back to your dad so that he can say goodbye? All right. Bye, honey. How much time do you got? Oh, love you, honey. Thank you so much, Cameron. I appreciate it. All right, if you want to call a call back. I will call back later. He'll just shut off here in a minute. Thank you for your YouTube channel. As Chris hangs up the phone, I can see that he looks exhausted. We've been talking for hours. It's time for me to go. Take care. All right. All the best. See y'all. Be careful. As we walk out of Chris's house, I'm trying to think about what this all means for the dep case. If one of Cameron's friends did buy a bunch of Middle East-based bots to support him, then that doesn't really help us much. It would mean that literally anyone close to Johnny Depp, a fan, a colleague, an agent, could have done the same thing. They would have had to spend more money for a more sophisticated campaign, but even then, the number of suspects would just be too big. But then, I remembered something else that EJ Hilbert told me. Another theory about why a country like Saudi Arabia might take an interest in Cameron. There are those potentials that there were somebody who wanted to help Cameron or help that situation. But more likely, when you're talking about international players and international hashtags in things of that nature, it is good done by people that want to hurt the US. They want to showcase the failures of the US. That's why you would have state actors or other groups in this. This is a propaganda war. This is a manipulation of the narrative of other people. What EJ tells me is startling, that even local cases like Cameron's can be useful propaganda for authoritarian states. It works on two levels. You show your own people that Western justice is not all it's correct up to be. And as a bonus, it creates more division in America itself. How do you destroy your enemy? How do you decrease the capabilities of an enemy? It is a rule that has been around forever. Sun Sioux talks about it every major army talks about it. You divide it and you conquer. The division is the goal. EJ's theory initially seemed far fetched. But then again, we've seen this before. When Russia wanted to interfere in the 2016 US election, they created hundreds of social media profiles pretending to be angry Americans whipping up hatred on all sorts of issues. And last year, thousands of Chinese accounts got kicked off Facebook for doing exactly the same thing. I'd always assumed that if someone had paid for bots to promote Johnny Depp, that it would be an individual, perhaps someone close to him or one of his advisors. But maybe I've been thinking about the Depp case all wrong. What if a state actor had its own interest in stoking up hate against Amber Heard? There was something Daniel Mackey told me the very first time I spoke to him. You're five-dollar blot, and that's your midnight special, it's your 38, you know, you have a 9-inch ulcer, and we'll get the job done in a Saturday night. So how much would you have her campaign as more like a nuclear submarine? It's something that I would see a state produce. I get back to the hotel and I start looking at some of the most prolific pro-Johnny Depp accounts. All out of curiosity than anything else, I feel to the results to see if any have tweeted in Arabic. I start pouring over all the hashtags, all the usernames, and then I find them. They aren't as obvious as the bots in the Heron case, but they are there. Twitter accounts, which today tweet in English about Johnny Depp. They present themselves as ordinary fan accounts, posting dozens of messages a day praising the actor and attacking Amber herd. On first glance, they seem to have started tweeting recently, but when I plug their details into the way back machine, which is a site that saves historic copies of webpages, a different picture emerges. Pro Depa Counts have actually. deleted hundreds of tweets. All the tweets are in Arabic, not in English, and not a single one mentions Johnny Depp or any other celebrity. Instead, lots of these tweets have another purpose altogether, to praise the Saudi government and its controversial ruler, Muhammad bin Salman. Next time on Who trolled Amber, we hone in on a perpetrator. It looks like these are totally from the flies, the Saudi Ministry of Flies accounts. We learn about unexpected friendship. I think we'll be seeing Johnny Depp go to Saudi Arabia a lot over the coming years, and I start looking more closely at Depp's team. This really rather unheard of character seems to be part of a very, very, very, malign web of characters who played a very active role in subverting Western democracies. 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 Patela. 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.