Why did right wing media spend money spreading anti-Amber Heard content?

Published Jun 7, 2022, 6:47 PM

We need to talk about the Amber Heard Johnny Depp defamation trial 

 

Toxic fans have made Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s trial inescapable: https://www.polygon.com/23068724/johnny-depp-amber-heard-trial-twitch-youtube-tiktok

Follow Ryan Brodericks’ newsletter Garbage Day: https://www.garbageday.email

 

The Bleak Spectacle of the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp Trial by Micheal Hobbes: https://michaelhobbes.substack.com/p/the-bleak-spectacle-of-the-amber?s=r

 

The Daily Wire Spent Thousands of Dollars Promoting Anti-Amber Heard Propaganda: https://www.vice.com/en/article/3ab3yk/daily-wire-amber-heard-johnny-depp?utm_source=vice_facebook&utm_medium=social

 

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Just a heads up. This episode mentions domestic abuse. The viral nature of this stuff is tried directly to capital and you can make a lot of money going really viral, posting all kinds of breathless updates about this like very Sad and your trial. There Are No Girls on the Internet. As a production of I Heart Radio and Unboss Creative. I'm Bridget Todd and this is there Are No Girls on the Internet. After Amber Heard published an ed in The Washington Post. In it, she wrote, quote I spoke up against sexual violence and faced our culture's wrath that has to change. And quote I became a public figure representing domestic abuse, and I felt the full force of our culture's wrath for women who speak out. And finally, quote I had the rare vantage point of seeing in real time how institutions protect men accused of abuse. Now, in these three statements that did not specifically name anyone as her abuser, a jury of five men and two women found that Amber Heard defamed her ex husband, actor Johnny Depp. Back Johnny Depp sued the British tabloid of the Sun for calling him a wife beater, and he lost. Now, the judge in that case ruled that Amber Heard's abuse claims were quote substantially true. But unlike that trial, that Depth lost in the most recent trial was live streamed and disseminated and seemingly endless clips on social media. Outside the Virginia courthouse, people waited for hours. Some hardcore Depth fanatics even dressed in cosplay of his character Captain Jack Sparrow from the movie Pirates of the Caribbean. Now I didn't watch the trial, but that doesn't mean I could escape it. I learned about the trial and memes and TikTok videos that framed Amber Heard as a crazy, lying, deceitful bitch, and the right wing website The Daily Wire spent thousands of dollars spreading this exact message around the Internet. So does this mean about our digital culture? What does it mean for women? What does it mean for survivors? I spoke to Ryan Broderick, tech writer and editor of Garbage Day, a newsletter about memes and the Internet, about the trial, the verdict, and what it all says about the Internet. So, you know, tell us about how you came to be somebody who studies and pays attention to memes and what they tell us about society. My villain origin story I suppose started in college. I was a journalism major and I liked the Internet a lot, and I didn't understand why no one in my journalism classes wanted to talk about what was happening on the Internet. I was reading all these great websites all the time, and none of our professors wanted to deal with it. And so I guess out of spite, I started to pay more and more attention to what I was seeing on the Internet. And then when I started to do my first jobs and internships, there was a lot of stuff happening online that no one was talking about. So I thought, Okay, this will be like my way in. And I never really moved past that. I've always just been really interested. And now people use the Internet in technology. I'm I'm a fan of sci fi, so I suppose that's kind of a part of that as well. Uh. And now I read a newsletter called Garbage Day, which is about memes, trends, uh, technology forecasting, stuff like that. And I have a podcast called The Content Minds, which is me and a friend named Luke Bailey. He's the head of audience development for the news in the UK and we uh basically get in like long protracted fights about what's happening on Twitter every week. That's that's my pitch for the show. Um, yeah, I know, and uh, it's it's good. It's a good time to write about the Internet and to think about the Internet because I think after the Trump era where things got very annoying, we're now in this moment of like infinite possibility and there's all these really interesting stories happening, whether it's crypto, the metaverse, TikTok memes, fandoms that are going feral, it's all just really good stuff. And I feel like I've been waiting many years for this level of Internet pop culture breakthrough. I mean, that's actually a great place to start talking about this trial. You know, in a piece of our polygon you wrote the trial is set off a toxic fandom bomb a major social platform. As major social platforms incentivized the worst human behavior possible to drive up their engagement metrics, and during depth be heard that the defensiveness, ugliness, and outrage cycle of online band communities has infected every corner of the web like a virus, taking shape of the content that does well on those platforms, So tell us you know what you mean by that and what, like, how have you seen this trial playing out online? Yeah, I mean it's definitely an evolution of something I think we saw a lot on spaces like Tumbler and read it ten years ago, when fandoms were kind of still more niche, you know, the that weird I'm really kind of obsessed with that weird period of time between let's say, like the Breaking Bad starting and the Walking Dad starting and then like the last season of Game of Thrones, and in that weird period of time, you go from fandoms being still kind of niche nerdy things that only kind of pop up are in comic cons and things like that too. Essentially the mainstream, like the Disney adults, the Harry Potter adults. These people who you know, may have been teenagers are in college ten years ago, and now they're adults and and they're acting like adults, but they're also still obsessed with fandoms and the and the Internet has evolved beyond these small corners on Tumblr and Reddit, so now that this is super mainstream everywhere, and I think in a lot of ways, the really disgusting, and I think it is disgusting behavior that people were engaging in around this trial. Um is the manifestation of those fandom spaces just not going away and becoming more entrenched. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that we live in a time of deeply consolidated pop culture. You know, Disney owns everything, and if stuff that they don't own, his own by Netflix, and stuff that they don't own his own by Warner Brothers, and that's kind of it. And so these companies, I think they feed into this. They they sort of the beast, and these fandoms have become extremely powerful, extremely engaging, extremely sticky culturally, and uh, they don't. They They're just full of people who act outrageous all the time and or and or and in my opinion, getting worse because you know, you may have seen like fandom blogs fighting with each other as teenagers on Tumbler ten years ago, but now these are like full grown adults, spending sometimes like thirty five thousand dollars. I read one woman paid that much to go to the trial and like bring al pacas so the Johnny Depp could pet her alpacas in case he was feeling depressed. Like this is this is absurd behavior, um, and no one seems to be thinking it's absurd, which is even crazier to me. One of the things is that I want to talk specifically about the Daily Wire and like what what this trial might mean for like right wing types, But I don't want to give the impression that it's all you know, I don't know, I guess. I when I first heard about this case, I was like, what's clearly like right wing types, men's rights in cells. But it's also like this mixed bag of of I guess, like fandom types. Can you give us a little breakdown of who you see the major players as? Yeah, So I've tried to sketch up this landscape, and unfortunately I have to kind of make like these vague um summaries. You know, I have to kind of because you're you're talking about blobs of culture. UM. So think of it like this. I would say a large chunk of the people who were pro Johnny Depp are Disney adults, people who genuinely miss Johnny Depp. Uh. They have like a nostalgic attachment to him, whether it's the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, or some other thing that he's a part of, and they want him back and they feel like he shouldn't have been removed from pop culture. You also have release the Snyder cut people, the the these like fans of the d C Entertainment universe who believe that Amber Herds, like interpersonal drama with Johnny Depp, to put it very lightly, was impacting their ability to see new superhero movies. And a lot of those guy guys are the same guys who make YouTube videos about Star Wars characters they don't like who just had so happened to be women or people of color. And they're the same guys who are probably teenagers during the game or game era. So I sort of see that is like the same man, the same like horrible Reddit YouTube man. You also have men's rights activists who see this trial as a proxy battle for me too. They believe that the me too movement went too far, even though like nothing happened to any of the powerful men really, but they believe it it went too far, and now this is a way to pull back and and fix things so that like you know, powerful men can continue being ship heads. You do have right wingers, though they were pretty late to the trial. And we'll talk about the Daily Wire in a second, but they really actually struggled to insert themselves into this because I don't think this was like really their battlefield. Um. You also have and this is very interesting because Johnny Depp was removed from their Fantastic Beasts franchise, which is a prequel series to Harry Potter. You have Harry Potter adults who believe that him being removed from the franchise screwed up the success of that franchise. And because you have Harry Potter adults, because J. K. Rowling is a vicious anti trans activist, you have turfs as well. You have trans exclusively radical feminist. So it's this really bizarre blob of some of the worst obsessive people on the Internet who have all rallied around this one trial because they've decided this is the trial that will also dictate their weird obsession and and and its relevancy in popular culture. Wow. Yeah, I mean talking about the Harry Potter stands and like Turf types, like way to be feminist, smearing a woman who has survived her of domestic violence like that. I guess that really shows how deep, they're they're feminist, their feminist ideology goes yeah. I I interviewed this this she's she's unbelievable. Her name is Amanda Brandon, I interr reader for my Polygon piece. She used to work at Tumbler now she does like trends research and and I couldn't use this quote because it was just like it was so much to put it in the piece. But essentially she she was sort of arguing that the same women who were or young girls who were bullying other women and girls on Tumbler fifteen years ago are now the ones like threatening to murder Amber heard on TikTok as as like full grown adults. And it's that same toxic strain of fandom and like a very particular fan fiction archetype of like loving the the really toxic character that like I can fix him tight, the raylos, the women who believe that like Ray should have ended up with Kylo reyn in Star Wars, Like this very specific kind of thing seems to be happening around a real person, and they don't seem to understand that, Like Johnny Depp isn't any of his characters, He's like, uh, from all accounts a very bad person. Um. I hope that it's not defamatory to say I believe he's a bad person. Um. And these a lot of it is is not right wingers, it's not politically motivated. It's like women who are like getting tattoos of his lawyer. And then oh my god, did you see that they were writing erotic fan fiction about Depth hooking up with his lawyer, Like just insane nonsense, like craziness. Like I would say, go outside, but they are going outside. They're going to the trial, which is so much worse, like stay inside, babe. I don't know, it's just it's awful. Yeah, I mean, I I know exactly that type. But I think a lot of Johnny Depp's uh, the different characters that he's portrayed, really feeds into it that, Like, you know, you look at like Edward scissor Hand like, oh, I'm like a like a really quiet, sweet soul who's very innocent, or like I'm like a really charming pirate that you just want to hang out with. I think that like a lot of people are projecting grown adults are projecting a lot onto these characters that you know, they're fictional, they're not like Johnny Depp is not actually a pirate. It he's not actually this like sensitive guy with scissors for hands. Yeah, he's not a pirate. He's not He is not Hunter S. Thompson. He is just like a man who seems to have a really bad drug and alcohol problem and like as a series of extremely toxic relationships with other people. So like, yeah, he's not like your small being that you can yes fix, you know exactly. And I think you bring up fandom, and I think that really explains this phenomenon with the trial that I don't know that I've ever really seen before, which is the way that it has been memed and turned into these like fan videos, particularly on TikTok. You know, I am someone who I'm not too proud to admit that, like I spent a lot of time hyper analyzing famous people that I had crushes on to be like, oh he there was a long and glance here, So that means this. And I see the way that these videos have really flooded internet spaces where they have the tinge of fan videos. Have you seen this? Yeah? No. In fact, my my coach Luke Bailey on our podcast pointed out that it's it's essentially the same behavior that was behind like the Larry shipping from one direction urs the idea that like Liam and Harry were secretly a couple and you could prove it by hyper analyzing their hands touching each other during a press conference. It's the same stuff we see with bts as well, you know, the it's it's this idea and in my opinion, it also ties in with our our obsession with true crime at the moment. It's this idea that there's so much media being produced. There's so many videos and images and and takes and and and spins on a on a thing that I think as human beings, we assume that all of our answers can be can be found there. It's the same thing we start the Gabby Petita disappearance. It's the same thing we see with like all of these TikTok trends, where it's like it's your brain almost goes like, Okay, if if there's a live stream of the trial and there's so many ways to watch the trial, I must be able to figure out exactly what's going on. Because if I'm not able to do that, that's almost like it's like psychologically upsetting the idea that like you could be lied to by what you're seeing with your own eyes. And I think, if I want to give a benefit of the doubt to anyone involved with making some of this like horrible content on TikTok, I think that's what's going on, is this idea, like, oh, of course I could figure out if he's lying or not, or she's lying, because like if I couldn't, then I can't trust anything that I see. You know, Um, maybe that's what's happening. Yeah, I think that's right. And then I think, like with Discovery, there's just so much content, so many videos, so many text messages, that it's I think that we I think it really demonstrates that we've created an Internet landscape that is really that incentivizes, I guess, conspiratorial thinking that like there must be some way to put this all together, to prove that she is like a gone Girl style lying bitch who has been for years, you know, coalescing to take this man down, even though that seems so outlandish. I almost believe that our Internet spaces are incentivize things that are the more outlandish they are, the more like difficult to believe they are more traction they'll get Yeah, I think that's true. And I'm as as someone who stares at this stuff all day long. I want to really be really clear, like I'm not someone who believes that Internet users are inherently bad or inherently act crazy. I think they respond to incentives, and they respond to like different user experience choices, and I think right now on the Internet, there is not a single social network that does not sort of incentivize acting like a complete maniac. I think they all give you like a weird point system that rewards the worst behavior imaginable, whether that's through retweets or likes or up votes or your audio trending or whatever it is. And so when it comes to a moment like this trial, there's not a place you can go on the Internet that's not going to give you more points for being more insane. And that's just a really sad thing. I wonder what discord conversations have been like, because that's a place where maybe you're not incentivized to be awful, although maybe you are. I don't know. I just think that, like, it's it's unfortunate that the majority of the people who are falling this trial. We're following it through TikTok and YouTube, which our platforms that will reward you for being more extreme and more annoying than the next person, let's say quick breaks at our back. On platforms like TikTok and YouTube, content creators have built entire platforms hyper analyzing the trial, and it really reminds me of the days of tabloid court TV, I mean O. J. Simpson trial, were so called body language experts try to glean whether or not someone is lying or telling the truth based on the way they use their hands or purse their lips in videos of the trial. And even though it's kind of a bunk pseudoscience, claims about body language to depict Amber heard as a liar have flooded the internet discourse about trial on YouTube, you're rewarded and you can kind of be like celebritized. Like I've seen all of these like body language experts scare quotes around that, or like legal experts or whatever, really making platforms off of like like commenting on this trial in a way that I'm not sure that's healthy for our our our understanding of what's happening. I'm not sure it's like a healthier Internet ecosystem when that is so so incentivized to the point where you can really make a name from it. Yeah, I mean, like, let's be clear, like there's no such thing as a body language expert. Like there's just not like like there's like, like our artificial intelligence stuff would be much better if we could give it information from from body language experts. They don't exist. It's not a thing like there's really and yet and yet there is this desire to have that because you know, it's like if someone's on camera, like you want to be able to get inside their head and know what they're thinking. But it's not possible. It's just not like and also I mean I don't want to get to like serious, but like a trial mutized person, an abused person, an allegedly abused person is probably not going to act in public the way you think they act or think they should act. This is actually very similar to the couch guys stuff on TikTok. So if you don't know, if your listeners don't know, a girl walks into surprise for boyfriend. The boyfriend doesn't react positively or negatively. He just sort of looks stunned, there's a girl on the couch next to him. People start making conspiracy theories that he was cheating and he got caught cheating. None of it was seems to be real. But I think what's like a really interesting dynamic sometimes with TikTok in particular, is that when like video footage hits TikTok of real life that doesn't look like the cinematic version that we're used to, people assume it's not real. But that's like saying like, oh, I can't recognize real life because it doesn't look like a movie. And kids on TikTok are are reacting really aggressively what that happens because it makes them uncomfortable, and I think that was a part of this as well, another dimension to this trial. Oh my gosh. I mean, I don't want to get too far off base, but it We did an episode about why so many like fabricated videos claiming to be from Ukraine during the invasion. We're able to like people believe them, and part of it is that we we have something going on where when we expect things to look cinematic, and so people were able to take things from movies or video games or cartoons and be like, oh, this is what's happening in Ukraine, and people believed it because of our because of our need to have things be so cinematic. And I think we're I think we're losing our ability to tell when something is real or something it's kind of bullshit because of it. I think it's worse. I think we prefer the bullshit because it's more comfortable. Like if you if you're faced with like raw life in a video, it's actually pretty uncomfortable. It's like it's like, like, you know, the Ukraine stuff is disturbing because it doesn't look like a movie. There's no like action here are running through the crowd like saving people. It's like it's awful. It's weird. If you're watching it like essentially a trial about defamation regarding a domestic violence allegations, it's not gonna look like, you know, Mr Smith goes to Washington. It's gonna look like a really sad, weird disolusion of an extremely toxic relationship. And it's not gonna look good. It's not gonna be funny, and it's probably not going to be comfortable to watch it with the we the we storm song, which is like, God, why why did that song become the song of this trial. It's bizarre to me because it didn't hurt, didn't physically hurt me. I have never seen a trial be memed the way that this trial was. You know that catchy little song you hear when you log onto a Nintendo We Do Do Do Do Do Do Do Well. If you're thinking that no one would ever use such a cheery, upbeat song on a video from a trial about something as serious as domestic violence, you would be wrong. Here's another example. A sneaky sounding song from the children's show The Backyard Against is often used on TikTok to illustrate someone being duplicitous or trying to get a way with something. After Herd's lawyer held up a makeup palette from the cosmetics brand Melanni after testifying that Amber used the makeup to cover bruises that she says that Johnny Depp gave her the Milanni brand, used video from the trial to create a cheeky TikTok scored to the Backyard Again song, pointing out that the specific product that her lawyer held up had not been released until after Amber heard and Johnny Depp broke up. Now, her lawyer never actually claimed that Amber Heard specifically used that Milanni product, just that she used makeup, but the video pretty clearly implies that they've caught Amber Heard in a cosmetics bace lie proving her guilt allah the climactic scene from the film Legally Blonde. Now, it's clear to me why a brand would want to get in on this. According to BuzzFeed, that one piece of content is Milanni Cosmetics is most watched TikTok ever, with five million views. Now prior to this, none of their videos has ever broke five thousand views. But it's pretty distasteful for a makeup brand to benefit from weighing in on a rial about domestic violence using a cute see meme on TikTok. And because the jury in this trial was not sequestered, it's entirely possible that jurors also watched all of this play out too. It is so weird, like I remember that thing where um it? During the trial, Amber Heard said that she used this this makeup to cover her bruises, and her lawyer held up this makeup palette Milani and then on TikTok Milani made this like cutesie response video being like, oh, it didn't come out until this year, like here's our and I think it's this. I think it's two things. I think it's one exactly like you said, like people people want a trial that regarding abuse to look like a movie where someone's going to catch somebody in a lie and be like a ha, and like they're gonna break down and admit that they were wrong. And I think that, you know, there would be a time where a big brand getting into the conversation about a trial regarding domestic violence, a very serious thing, making a cute see little meme on tick talk using the Backyard Agin song you know as the sound that I found that to be so distasteful and I, like I said, I just have never seen a trial where people and brands and stuff commented on it like the like the way that that should be commented on by the brand if the brand really wants to get into it is by like a turth public statement, not a cutely little meme TikTok video. I just found that so distasteful. I mean, you you you bring up a really good point and this is like a thing that we're currently in the middle of and I'm curious how it will end. I assume. I assume a brand will go uh. I assume a brand will go too far and this will stop. But as of right now, brands are sort of in this post Trump internet era trying to figure out how they can insert themselves into online conversations. And you know, for the last like five years, it's actually been pretty unsafe for a brand to exist on the Internet because everything is political. They don't want to get involved, they don't want to like get wrapped up in some polarizing thing. But now certain brands are being actually, we can be totally nuts on the Internet and people will like it. And I you know, I'm waiting for the brand that goes too far. I'm waiting for the brand that like, I don't know, like makes a meme about a school shooting or something like. I'm waiting for the brand that just like completely goes all the way and then everyone's like, Okay, we can't, we can't do this anymore. Time to pull back, Yeah, exactly. Um, And I don't know when that's going to happen, but I think we're I think we're getting close. I I'm ready for it to sap more after a quick break, let's get right back into it. So I didn't pay very close attention to the trial when it was happening, and I think I see now that part of the reason why that is is because I have been swayed by a deliberate campaign to create doubt and fog, you know, people who weren't really paying super close attention, but who were seeing lots of content on social media about the trial. And I also really didn't see a lot of people speaking up in support of herd. I just kept seeing these snippets of the trial that painted amber Heard in this really negative light. So I think I honestly just assumed that this must be some sort of complicated situation where the truth is somewhere in the middle. But if you look at reporting from people like journalist Michael Hobbs, who's been chronicling the trial, you can check out some of his reporting in the show description Amber Heard told a plausible evidence backstory of abuse. So why did so many of us like me just kind of stay out of it. I have to say, like I feel a little bit like guilty slash weird. I didn't really engage on this trial until pretty recently. And I think part of it was that, like probably, like a lot of people, I'm kind of what you might describe as like a low information person. I didn't follow the trial. I don't really love spending time digging into like abuse and things like that, Like it's just not doesn't feel good or safe for me. And I feel like part of it is I have to admit that because of all the information I was absorbing on TikTok and Twitter and YouTube, despite the fact that I was not interested in this trial, not following it at all, Uh, it made it seem as though, like, oh, like it's a he said she said, like maybe they were abusive toward each other. It's so murky, like just stay out of it. And I now kind of realized like I had been sort of taken by a full like a like a campaign to make me think that to make me think like, oh, they're either a amber heard must be a psycho lying bit or be the story must be that like it's quote mutual abuse, say both down awful. I don't know, and I guess I feel a little bit. It's hard. It's hard to realize the role that I personally played in carrying water for people who were interested in misrepresenting what was happening in this trial. Yeah, I mean, it's not your fault. It's it's not your fault. It's in the best interests of everyone involved to make you think that it's it's in the best interest of of platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok to make this into a larger narrative, to make this into a proxy fight. And it's in the best interests for all those people who are making that content to do that, because they're making lots and lots and lots of stupid money on it like that, And that's like the really sad thing is that, like the viral nature of this stuff is tried directly to capital and you can make a lot of money going really viral, posting all kinds of breathless updates about this like very sad and weird trial. Which I think is the difference between this and the O. J. Simpson trial, which is that you have the role now of the individual creators who were able to jump on the bandwagon in a way that was not as easy to do in a pre internet media landscape. Vice News reported that the Daily Wire, the conservative outlet founded by Ben Shapiro, spent between thirty five thousand and forty seven thou dollars on Facebook and Instagram ads promoting art close about the trial, eliciting some four million impressions. According to Media Matters, these posts from the Daily Wire pages account for nearly forty seven percent of posts about the trial from right leading pages and nearly eight percent of related posts from all news and politics pages. The content they promoted showed a clear bias against her, some of which contained outright inaccurate information about the trial. Immediately following the verdict, Kyle Rittenhouse, who you might remember became kind of a right wing celebrity after traveling to Kenosha, Wisconsin with a gun in shooting and killing two protesters and was later acquitted, has already signaled that the verdict inspired him to pursue defamation charges against media who covered his case. I asked Ryan why a right wing news site like The Daily Wire would be invested in spreading anti Amber heard messaging. What's going on there? What do you think is happening? It's so weird because like okay, so you hear that and you're like, okay, we and a lot of people were like, we got it, we we figured it out. This is all fake. No would think this, and it's a right wing astroturfing campaign to make people into pro Johnny Depth supporters. And it's like, no, I went through the metrics. No one's reading the stuff that the Daily Wires do it there then none of the articles they're paying to promote are being read by anybody, which makes me which is like even weirder to be, which is like they're so far behind the like the Disney Ladies doing like Jack Sparrow cause play in front of the courthouse. This is this is like what what what it seems to be what they're doing. I guess they have some kind of advertising budget they've got to spend. Uh you know, maybe it's the because of the dark money they're getting from like you know, Republican benefactors or whatever it is. They got to spend their money. So they're spending the money. And I think what they're what they're trying to do with it is like packaging in a way, so that I mean, actually we we we sort of have the answer now, which is that like the day after the trial, Kyle Rittenhouse goes on Twitter and he's like, I'm thinking about suing Cenna or whoever now for defamation. And I think that's why the Daily Wire and sort of themselves into this is because they want to make it really clear to other right wing like activists and um, you know, media companies that they can start to weaponize defamation trials in the same way. And that's why they were so like engaged and invested in this trial. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean I spent a lot of time trying to figure out, like what does this mean, like why would they be invested? But I do think that's part of it, And I wonder do you think that it's part of it? Could also be like I don't know, I went to the Daily Wire website just to see like what's going on, and the first thing I got before even going in was like a pop up that says, what is a woman like? Click here to find more. But I wonder if they're like trying to seize on this like high engagement thing to get more people align. Yeah, I don't know, like come for the you know, cultural thing that everybody is talking about. Stay for the like anti trans anti black nonsense. I think that's definitely true. I mean, their whole business model, their whole editorial model is like taking a thing, is like taking a thing that everyone's talking about and inserting themselves into it, hijacking it and making it about them. They're and they're they're they're fairly good at it. You just described like mead drunk out of wedding exactly. They're just like they're like the worst person you've ever met at a party. I'm not saying you are, I'm saying uh, And they, you know not they they're not gonna ask you any questions about yourself. They just wanted to talk about whatever they want to talk about, over and over again. But um, they did this with their Freedom Convoy a couple of months ago, where it was happening in Canada and the Daily Wire was largely responsible for it to start going viral in America on Facebook. And so I think that they figured that if they can find these these movements early enough, they can like turn up the volume for conservatives and then like kick it up all the way to you know, Fox News or whatever. And I think that's what they tried to do with this, But I think that it was too inherently complicated, uh, like from the fandom perspectives for them to really like monopolize on it. What do you think it says about our digital system that, you know, we have this like kind of bogus quote new site that is really more of like a content platform that just has a lot of like click baity material. Like what do you think of the fact that like that is seen as a viable whether or it was viable for them because it seems like nobody was really like reading that content, but like the fact that that is seen as a strategy, what do you think it says about our digital ecosystem? Yeah, so this is really fascinating. Um Like, and I always used like the Trump era as as sort of a way to define this new one because we haven't figured out like what we're really in yet. But this did start to happen during the Trump ere which is that like all of American culture kind of flowed through Trump, like Trump's tweets, which was extremely annoying and like whatever what happened during the day was set by his Twitter account. Um then that went away, But the urge to have like a thing that everyone in America all fights about all day has stuck, and so try ending topics now, at least in America and then a few other countries. I've seen this too, but particularly in America are training topics aren't really trending topics. They're more like capture the flag. So let's say the the trial we're talking of the depth heard trial, and it's trending, every single community on the Internet is going to try to insert themselves into that trending topic. Not because they particularly care about the trial. Maybe they do, but I'm gonna guess that overwhelmingly what they really care about is attention for their particular cause, their particular advocacy, their particular community. And you see this a lot on like every like every side of the political spectrum, like, for instance, like um, I saw a bunch of people immediately after the Vivaldi shooting being like, conservatives, uh, won't let women have abortions, but they will force their children to go to school, and then they won't protect them when they get to school. You know, I'm paraphrasing, And it's like, oh, but like the abortion debate is is one debate and the school streeting debate is another debate. But immediately progressive actors are like, know, these are the same debate, and it's like, but they're they're they're not, They're really not, I mean other than the debate of hating Republicans, which I can get behind, you know, like that's how like our brains work now. So it's it's like, oh, it's the death Heard trial, but it's not just the death Heard trial. It's also the entire meat to movement. It's also the way defamation works. It's also Kyle Rittenhouse now wants to sue the Washington Post. It's like all of this stuff has to fit the trending thing, and the Republicans are much better at it than than the Democrats. You have Christopher Rufo at the Manhattan Institute. He's the grand architect of the anti critical race theory movement that's like spreading it through small towns in America right now. And he's kind of created the playbook of like whatever's turning that day, no matter what it is, no matter how stupid it is. Like literally, right now, while we're talking, a bunch Republicans are pissing their pants over a thing that Pizza Hut is doing, and they're not pointing at Pizza Hut and being like this is the sign of all wokeness and it's got to go. And they're really good at it. They're really good at just like finding anything on Twitter and raging about it, oh day all week. Progressives, liberals, leftist, they're not so good at it. And I think it's very disorienting for people. And it's supposed to be You're supposed to feel the way you felt, which is like, I don't know what's going on. I'm just seeing everyone yelling about it. There must be a reason because they, because like conservatives in particular, know that none of us have enough time to dig to the bottom of the trash heap and figure out that there's nothing there. There's nothing to talk about. It's just it's it's nonsense. But if they spew enough nonsense, they can distract is long enough to take aware of voting rights. That's that seems to be the entire game plan. Oh that's I mean, you've really said it, and I think that, like, that's exactly how I felt that. It was just like seems like a bunch of nonsense. I don't have time to get involved. I don't have time to have a take. I don't have time to do any investigation and it's going to tune it out. And yeah, I mean, I think it's like one of the results of the of our current internet landscape is that like it's so hard to just have a thoughtful conversation about the thing. Everything is a proxy war. Like we're no longer able to just have a thoughtful subsidence of conversation about abortion rights or whatever, because it's like we're talking about eighteen different things, and it's like I can understand why people are just like, Nope, I'm checking out. I'm not going to follow it. It's too much. Uh. And meanwhile, we're all just so like heated and distracted that we're just not really able to to zero in on what it's actually substitutively happening. Yeah, and and and what's even like more insidious is that, like, for the most part, mainstream media disregards anything that's happening in the celebrity sphere as frivolous because it's typically seen something that's either written about by women, read by women, cared about the way by women. You see this reaction with Kim Kardashian stuff. She's the most famous woman on earth, She's like the Maryland role of our time. And yet we don't take her, you know, largely, she's relegated to the celebrity pages. And so what's crazy, and like you've been driving me crazy watching this is that like this is one of the most like cataclysmic defamation precedents that's ever happening in American history. Like this woman was sued over three sentences in an op ed in the in the Washington Post, and and and no serious journals for the Capital of j is freaking out about that. That this is a massive blow to press freedom in America because now any man powerful enough to hire a legal team and set up a kangaroo court with a livestream somewhere can bully anyway to the fact that Kyle Rittenhouse immediately was like, yeah, I'm gonna do everybody. And and because this is about two celebrities, and this is about like a crazy woman and like her actor husband or whatever, her ex husband, Like, no one's taking it seriously. And I think the conservatives know that really well. They know that they can insert whatever they want because like you know, the serious man men on CNN aren't gonna like talk about this with the gravity that are acquires, which is which is also you know, as I said, very insidious, and it's very sad because this is scary. This is like a scary thing. Yeah, And I think you really named something that I don't think i've I've had language to talk about, which is that when you have people who are flooding the space, whether it's you know, right wing journalists or like Disney adults on TikTok, and there's not like substitutive pushback or like bunking, it's just yeah, it's so hard to like like basically it's like we're playing catch up. I guess, like the truth and the reality of what's happening is playing catchup, and it's so much harder when you have so many people who have been like really effectively changing the conversation for a long time. Yeah, and like these people don't care if they're if they're wrong, like like they don't really care if they even understand what the trials about, Like they don't, Like I think there's this knee jerk response from a lot of other people where they're like, okay, like if we can just like get the facts out, everyone can agree like they used to in the nineties, and it's like they didn't you just couldn't hear them. Now you can hear them, and unfortunately, some of them can be louder than you. And so there's like we're in this really weird landscape where it's like we don't have the illusion of cultural consensus that we had twenty or thirty years ago. We probably never did, I mean, like to find a grandparent and asked them how they feel about like a particular news event from thirty sears ago. They're probably have a very different take than somebody else. But now it's all happened at the same time, and certain communities, certain political movements are better at playing with that chaos, I think, than others, and the rest of us just have to suffer because it's super annoying and very confusing. On Wednesday, the jury and the trial found that heard to Fame Johnny Depp in that Washington Post piece from in which she called herself a public figure representing domestic abuse depth was awarded more than ten million dollars in damages. You know, you mentioned earlier sort of how big of a precedent this set and it's very scary, you know, given that we saw the verdict just I guess was that yesterday. Yeah, given that we saw the verdict yesterday that um heard has to it what did in fact libel depth according to the jury and has to pay back more than her net worth and damage? Is like, what do you see the impact being in media? In journalism and then just you know generally sort of for all of us for survived risk of the internet, Like, where do you see this going? Yeah? I mean the first thing is just like anyone who's experienced domestic abuse, anyone who believes that they experienced domestic abuse just is not going to feel as confident coming forward about it. I read a statistic yesterday, I think it came from a Rolling Stone piece about how just one advocacy group for domestic violence SVIRUS, was saying that hundreds of women immediately heard the verdict and pulled like any anything to do with that charity. And they didn't they didn't want to go forward with any sort of prosecution or anything they wanted to. They don't want to do it. So that's that's the immediate impact. And that's like that, that's the that's the silent one. You know. The next one is that like we're gonna see much. I think we're gonna see what's called a chilling effect on free speech. You know, for for the free speech warriors on the right wing, they sure it don't seem to want the rest of us to speak. Um. So you know that the idea of an op ed like the one that caused this trial happening again is probably much rarer. Now. I think a lot of the reporting that was happening around those kinds of stories won't happen the same way again. You'll need you'll need to have harder evidence, tighter reporting guidelines. They'll be more fear of retribution and things like that. Um. And then like I just think that you know, we we don't really totally understand like what live streaming a trial does to its verdict. And that's that kind of a more open ended one. This was a circus. And like you know, in Johnny Depp's legal team I think sought out this particular court because in this particular judge, because I knew it would be an absolute circus. And you know, the the judge will probably go on to get our own TV show on some right wing news channel. So like there's just no there's no account of there's no there's nothing you can do because everyone involved. It's just in bad faith. It's just it's it's a mess. I mean, it's funny you say like it's a circus, and I know that you mean that as a figure of speech. But there were lamas, Like there were lamas and people dressed like pirates, and like there's like face painting going on. It was a literal circus. I mean, it's a really good, I guess, cautionary reminder of how like I feel that with the injection of the Internet and lots of strangers eyes on things, we can have very good things, like people can really get accountability. But also it can really quickly turn the tide in ways that I think we should really be aware of. Yeah, and I don't think we know yet. I don't think we know exactly how it turns the tide or shapes public opinion. Yet we know that like it causes chaos. We know that it like impacts people's understanding of events, but we really don't know like long term, like how people will understand this um. I suspect that this traum in particular will be one that's like studied and media course is going forward. I mean, it is the closest thing we have to like the the internet eras o J trial or or or um, the Watergate hearings or something, which sounds kind of crazy to like elevate the level, But so far it's kind of as close as we've come. Unless we get the actual insurrection hearings. This is probably like the big one that we're gonna like study survivors and their advocates are wondering what comes next after this precedent setting trial. Toronto Burke, the founder of the me too movement, set in a statement following the verdict, this movement is very much alive. You all want to play ping pong and have your way with the hashtag because it doesn't mean anything to you, so you try to kill it every few months. But it means something to millions and millions of folks. It means freedom, it means community, it means safety, it means power. You can't kill us. We are beyond the hashtag. We are a movement. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi. You can reach us at Hello at tangodi dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangodi dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me bridgetad. It's a production of I Heeart Radio and Unboss creative Jonathan Strickland as our executive producer. Tera Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from I heeart Radio, check out the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

There Are No Girls on the Internet

Marginalized voices have always been at the forefront of the internet, yet our stories often go over 
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