On the surface, they look like genuine Johnny Depp fans. Their social-media accounts are filled with pictures of the Hollywood star, and they tweet up to 20 times a day, praising Depp and trashing his former wife, Amber Heard.
‘Amber is an abuser and a liar,’ claims one. ‘She’s a traitor.’ Another says: Heard ‘disgusts me’, adding: ‘Johnny is innocent . . . he’s a legend.’
Except these accounts aren’t run by genuine fans at all. The evidence suggests they’re controlled by paid, human trolls — with links to the Saudi government.
In 2022, Depp, 60, won a defamation case against Heard, 37, after a U.S. jury found she had made up allegations of domestic abuse against him. Depp’s victory was a stunning comeback for the actor.
Two years before, a UK court had reached the opposite conclusion, with a judge finding that Depp had abused Heard on 12 occasions.
Depp has visited Saudi Arabia on several occasions, staying on the royal yacht Serene. He is pictured at a film festival on November 30, 2023 in Jeddah
In 2022, Johnny Depp, 60, won a defamation case against Amber Heard, 37, after a U.S. jury found she had made up allegations of domestic abuse against him
Amber Heard’s team suspected someone had hired ‘bots’ — automated accounts — to attack her and defend Depp, but they could never prove it
Before the U.S. trial, thousands of pro-Depp accounts sprang up on social media. Heard’s team suspected someone had hired ‘bots’ — automated accounts — to attack her and defend Depp, but they could never prove it.
Yet were they right after all?
For months, I’ve been investigating whether Heard was subjected to an organised trolling campaign and, if so, who was responsible. The results are released today in Who Trolled Amber?, a six-part podcast for Tortoise.
We have found evidence that, in the run-up to the trial, more than 50 per cent of all the tweets that criticised Amber Heard were ‘inauthentic’.
That means they either came from bots, which are automated accounts able to pump out thousands of messages a day, or paid ‘trolls’ — real people hired to post ugly messages online.
We examined more than one million tweets — the first large-scale analysis of its kind. The results suggest that bots and trolls played a significant role in turning public opinion — certainly online — against Heard.
Daniel Maki, a former spy who tracks disinformation campaigns, told me: ‘There’s a 0.1 per cent chance this was all organic [occurring naturally without external output]. There’s no way that this was all organic. I’ll bet you $1 million.’
But that’s not all.
As well as anti-Heard trolls, we found pro-Depp accounts — with links to Saudi Arabia.
Today, these accounts tweet in English, but I found hundreds of earlier, now-deleted tweets from the very same accounts, all in Arabic. None of them mentioned Depp nor any other celebrity. Instead, most praised the Saudi regime or its authoritarian ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, often known as MBS.
Saudi Arabia has a long history of using bots and trolls to promote its rulers and disparage its opponents. The regime even ran its own ‘troll farm’ in the capital Riyadh, where workers were paid $3,000 (£2,400) per month.
The Saudis are masters of online disinformation. Was it merely a coincidence that pro-Depp accounts on social media came from the country? Perhaps not.
Saudi Arabia’s authoritarian ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, often known as MBS
Depp and Heard married in 2015 but split in 2016 and filed for divorce
‘Authoritarian states, including Saudi, have to have a means of controlling social media,’ Marc Owen Jones, an expert in Middle Eastern disinformation, told me.
‘The Twitter accounts you’ve identified exhibit indications [of] a rented bot network or a for-hire propaganda network.’
Why would people in Saudi Arabia want to spend time and money secretly supporting Johnny Depp online? Well, you might have read recently that Depp and MBS have developed a bizarre ‘bromance’.
Depp has visited Saudi Arabia on several occasions, staying on the royal yacht Serene — a 439ft Italian-made craft with seven decks, a submarine and a ‘snow room’ — and praising the country for its ‘blossoming film architecture’. According to Bradley Hope, the author of a book about MBS, no subjects are off-limits between the two unlikely buddies.
They even discussed the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in an operation led by Saudi operatives in 2018. (MBS assured Depp that he didn’t personally order Khashoggi’s killing — a conclusion flatly rebutted by America’s CIA.)
So, what’s in this friendship for Depp? The answer is obvious. The actor, whose Hollywood career has badly faltered has an incentive to stay pals with the prince.
His two most recent films — Jeanne du Barry and Modi — have been partly financed by millions of dollars of Saudi money. But Depp is important to Saudi Arabia, too. Under MBS’s ‘Vision 2030’ plan, the country is investing hundreds of billions to transform itself into an entertainment and sporting hub. Securing Depp as an advocate of Saudi film is a big PR coup for the regime.
‘What they both believe to be a lifelong relationship has begun,’ Hope told me. ‘I think we’ll be seeing Johnny Depp go to Saudi Arabia a lot.’
In 2018, after the Khashoggi murder, thousands of Saudi government-controlled bots flooded social media with messages playing down the killing and praising MBS. The bots became so widespread that experts came to call them ‘the flies’.
Bradley Hope examined the pro-Depp tweets coming from Saudi Arabia and told me: ‘It looks like these are from the flies. These are the Saudi “Ministry of Flies” accounts.’ However, this doesn’t mean that MBS sat down and personally decided to unleash the ‘flies’ against Amber Heard.
‘Somehow it became known that MBS had a new fascination with Johnny Depp and that he wanted to help him in some way,’ Hope theorised. ‘Somebody gets the idea that this is the agenda and it becomes a sanctioned message to send through the flies’ channels.’
Attribution is always tricky in cases of online disinformation.
Today, almost anyone can pay for bots and leave little trace of their actions. But the startling implication of what I’d found was that Saudi government bots had been tasked to support Depp and troll his former wife — thereby helping to influence public opinion at a critical time for the fallen Hollywood legend.
THE Saudi link is far from the only troubling discovery I made while working on Who Trolled Amber.
I asked two data experts — Zhouhan Chen, of New York University, and Kaicheng Yang, of Northeastern University — to analyse our database of one million tweets about Depp and Heard. They found numerous examples of ‘inauthentic activity’ in this vast dataset.
These included: ‘bot networks’ in Thailand and Spain which tweeted large numbers of pro-Depp messages; fake pro-Depp accounts that used AI-generated profile pictures to provide a veneer of authenticity; and even accounts that worked together to coordinate anti-Amber hate.
In one case, more than 100 Twitter accounts sent 1,000 identical messages at exactly the same time to any company that had worked with Heard. The message read: ‘This brand supports domestic violence against men.’
Some of the suspicious accounts appeared to be automated: bots set up to retweet popular hashtags or posts. But others behaved like humans, posting original content.
Chen, one of our researchers, explained further: ‘I identified multiple campaigns [against Heard]. Each campaign roughly consists of hundreds to thousands of accounts. I would say conservatively there are many thousands of accounts that are “inauthentic”.’
Overall, Chen’s opinion was that more than 50 per cent of all the tweets in the database I obtained came from inauthentic accounts. If Chen is correct, it means that bots and trolls played more than a minor role in framing what social media thought about Heard.
And this matters.
Back in 2022, the Virginia jury in Depp v Heard wasn’t ‘sequestered’ — that is, they were sent home every night. This meant they could have theoretically logged on to the internet during the trial, even if they weren’t supposed to.
If they had, they would have seen that social media had come to one conclusion: that Amber was lying about Depp’s abuse.
Between 2016 and 2022, more than 800,000 tweets were posted with the hashtag ‘#amberheardis anabuser’. Only 15,000 tweets used the hashtag ‘#johnnydeppis anabuser’, even though she was the one accusing him of abuse.
Tens of thousands of posts across social media also called Amber a ‘gold-digger’, a ‘whore’ and worse. But, you might still say: so what? Is it really significant if someone commissioned bots to attack an actress?
I believe it is. This case has wider ramifications than just an unedifying spat between two pampered Hollywood actors.
This year is the biggest election year in history. Billions of people in more than 50 countries — not least America and very likely Britain — will go to the polls. It feels like democracy itself is on the ballot.
At the same time, it’s becoming easier to pump out misinformation online. Only last weekend, Home Secretary James Cleverly warned that ‘malign actors’ could use ‘AI-generated content’ to influence the outcome of a general election.
Countries like Russia are poised to try to disrupt elections in the West. Artificial-intelligence software including ChatGPT has made creating realistic bots a lot easier. And major social media companies like X/Twitter have cut staff and downsized online safety teams.
So, if you couldn’t tell the difference between a real-life Johnny Depp fan and a bot in 2022, then you probably won’t be able to tell a Russian troll from a U.S. election official in 2024. And that represents a serious problem for the security of our democracies.
So much so that the World Economic Forum last month identified AI-fuelled misinformation as the greatest immediate risk to global leaders over the next two years.
AFTER I had the evidence that bots and trolls played a large role in the Amber Heard case, as well as strong suggestions that much of the trolling came from Saudi Arabia, I turned my attention to the role played by Adam Waldman, Depp’s longtime lawyer.
The brash Waldman, married to beauty magnate Dr Barbara Sturm, is a controversial figure who was kicked off the U.S. trial for leaking confidential material to the Press.
While I didn’t find direct evidence that Waldman had commissioned a ‘bot army’ to help his client, I did find evidence that he was willing to talk to real-life trolls.
In court, Waldman admitted speaking to three YouTubers — all of whom were virulently pro-Depp. In 2020, one of these YouTubers obtained a recording of a private argument between Depp and Heard, in which Heard appeared to admit physically assaulting Depp.
It’s likely that Waldman, or someone close to him, passed the YouTuber the audio file (Waldman admitted giving a similar clip to MailOnline).
When YouTuber Brian McPherson, known as ‘ThatBrianFella’, published the recording, seven minutes had been cut from the original audio, making Heard appear less sympathetic than in the full recording.
The edited recording was listened to around six million times and became one of the key moments when public sympathy moved away from Heard and towards Depp.
Then the more I looked into Waldman’s background, the murkier things got.
I examined the Foreign Agent Registration Act (Fara) files that to him — submitted by law by anyone in the U.S. who works for a ‘foreign agent’.
Waldman had to file Fara papers for years, because he worked for Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch close to Vladimir Putin.
The Fara papers show he advised Deripaska on everything from Press strategy to business deals. They also reveal that at one point Waldman and Deripaska holidayed together as friends.
But Deripaska wasn’t even Adam Waldman’s most controversial Russian client. From 2010 to 2017 he worked for Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister. Working for Lavrov is like working directly for the Russian state.
Intriguingly, Waldman’s work for Lavrov coincided with a period when Waldman also represented Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder currently fighting extradition to the U.S. — and who has been widely accused of working with Russia, which he denies.
Waldman did not respond to a request for comment.
After I contacted him, he posted my request on Twitter, provoking some of Depp’s troll army to attack me online.
‘The sentient, alert humans you call “trolls” and “bots” are real people . . . who would like the truth, reality and the facts back,’ Waldman wrote.
Johnny Depp and the Saudi embassy did not respond to a request for comment.
So, after months of investigation, where does that leave us?
Even when we can show that trolls and bots are part of a campaign of disinformation, it’s almost impossible to prove who is responsible and call them to account.
Yet I worry that, as these malign techniques become ever more popular in the hands of nefarious characters, the consequences will extend far beyond a single ugly divorce — and strike at the heart of our democracy.
The first two episodes of Who Trolled Amber? are available now (lnk.to/WhoTrolledAmber). New episodes will be released weekly. To listen to the whole series, subscribe to Tortoise or to Tortoise+ on Apple podcasts.
By Daily Mail Online, February 27, 2024
