Amber Heard Subjected To 'One Of The Worst Cases Of Platform (Twitter) Manipulation' During Johnny Depp Trial: Report

A Bot Sentinel report suggested that Amber Heard and her supporters were subjected to "one of the worst cases of cyberbullying and cyberstalking by a group of Twitter accounts”.

New Delhi: Johnny Depp and Amber Heard's Trial was one of the most covered and followed cases in recent times. Although their defamation suit has come to an end, both actors make headlines everyday because of one or the other aspect related to their case. Recently, a report suggested that Amber Heard and her supporters were subjected to "one of the worst cases of cyberbullying and cyberstalking by a group of Twitter accounts”.

A report release by a non-partisan website Bot Sentinel, which uses AI to track and fight misinformation and harassment studied that more than 14,000 hashtags such as '#AmberHeardIsAnAbuser' and '#AmberHeardIsALiar' to come to this conclusion.

The report's key findings include:

* 627 Twitter accounts predominantly tweeted about Amber Heard and her female supporters negatively.
* The women supporters were targeted specifically and were subject to rampant abuse.
* About 24% of accounts which were generating anti-Amber Heard tweets were created in the last 7 months.
* Toxic trolling relating to Amber Heard continued with specific targeting to women through the continuous use of hashtags.
*3288 accounts were tweeting #AmberHeardIsAnAbuser, etc. and 19% of these were dedicated to spamming and hashtags.

Bot Sentinel was hired by Amber Heard's legal team to determine if the social media activity against Ms. Heard was 'organic or if there was some other explanation'.

The report said, "We determined that a significant portion of the activity wasn't organic and put our findings in a report. In June 2022, we began reexamining the activity after the Depp v. Heard verdict. Neither Amber Heard nor anyone from her team hired Bot Sentinel to review the activity."

"During the Depp vs. Heard trial, we observed anti-Amber Heard hashtags regularly trending on Twitter. After the trial ended, the anti-Amber Heard hashtags continued trending. We researched the activity to determine whether the trending hashtags resulted from organic activity or platform manipulation," the Bot Sentinel report said.

"We immediately observed dozens of newly created accounts spamming negative anti-Amber Heard hashtags. Many accounts were replying to tweets with hashtags unrelated to the tweet they were responding to. Some accounts encouraged others to get the hashtags trending, and the trolls were successful on multiple occasions", it added.