According to Bot Sentinel, Johnny Depp’s troll accounts were responsible in one of the most hateful online campaigns. They artificially amplified anti-Amber Heard messages, and attacked women who supported them with harassment, cyberstalking, and doxxing.
Heard’s team hired Bot Sentinel in 2020 to determine whether online hate mounting against her was organic; the firm determined that much of it was not. The research group that focuses on social media harassment and misinformation claims Heard didn’t request the information.Report published Monday.
Bot Sentinel claims it discovered 672 Twitter accounts in its report “focused predominantly on tweeting negatively about Amber Heard.” Hashtags such as #AmberHeardIsAnAbuser and #AmberHeardIsALiar were tweeted by 3,288 accounts, 19% of which aimed to trend hashtags artificially, and 24% of which were created in the past seven months.
It was also revealed that Amber Heard supporters were the victims of cyberbullying, cyberstalking, and targeted trolling via Twitter. In one case, the report says, a troll account used a photo of a woman’s deceased child to harass her for supporting Heard on Twitter; it says the woman, a “prominent academic”Bot Sentinel didn’t identify the person, so she had her family doxxed.
After the Depp vs. Heard trial, hashtags and tweets calling for anti-Amber Heard were continued for weeks.
A judge last week denied Heard’s request to vacate the $10.4 million judgment against her, the result of ex-husband Johnny Depp’s win in a Virginia court. Heard was found guilty of defaming Depp and damaging his career by publishing an opinion piece in the Washington Post, in which she described herself as an abuse victim.