Into the dark | Who Trolled Amber Ep 3

Transcript

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Speaker 18 Just a warning before we start, this series contains strong language and descriptions of violence.

Speaker 18 Oh, yeah, I think it's 100% inauthentic. I have no doubt about that.

Speaker 18 We're back in London, and we've got Ron Schnell's data set. Ron collected almost a million tweets in the run-up to the Depp Hurd trial.

Speaker 18 I hope this trove of information will reveal clues about who trolled Amber. And my producer, Xavier, and I have finally found an expert who is willing to look into it.

Speaker 18 My name is Johan. Johan Chen.
I'm the founder of SafeLink Network, where we're building technologies to detect anomalies on the internet.

Speaker 18 During my PhD, I got to work at security teams with Twitter, Amazon, and Google, detecting different bad actors.

Speaker 18 Johan is the man behind something called Information Tracer, this pretty cool website I've been using a lot on this investigation.

Speaker 18 Information Tracer is an AI-powered tool to help people search and investigate different social media campaigns. Johan has the credentials we need, but I also want a second opinion.

Speaker 17 Hey Kai Chang, how are you?

Speaker 20 Great, how are you?

Speaker 17 I'm okay, happy new year.

Speaker 20 I have a PhD in informatics. Right now, I'm a postdoctoral researcher.

Speaker 18 Kai Cheng Yang is a big name in the world of misinformation.

Speaker 20 He created a program called Botometer, a machine learning algorithm that can find social bots on Twitter.

Speaker 18 Do you remember? That's what Ron Schnell used when he was working on the case.

Speaker 21 I fed in hundreds of thousands of anti-Amber Heard tweets and got a lot of data.

Speaker 18 Kai Cheng's program is pretty well known. Elon Musk used Botometer in a lawsuit against Twitter's former owners when he was trying to back out of the deal to buy it.

Speaker 20 How to say

Speaker 18 correct.

Speaker 18 Both Johan and Kai Cheng are experts at detecting misinformation.

Speaker 18 If anyone's going to find bots, if anyone can tell us whether they were working at scale or even acting in coordination, it's these guys.

Speaker 18 But it's going to take them a while to properly analyze so many tweets. A couple of weeks at least.
So for now, you've got Alexi and Xavier instead.

Speaker 18 We don't know how to code or run algorithms, but that's okay because this story has never just been about data.

Speaker 18 Johan and Kaicheng are looking for patterns across the dataset. Their analysis will show us the overall role that bots played in the Amber case.
But I'm just as interested in the specifics.

Speaker 18 I want to find individual users who are not who they say they are. So, Zav and I lock ourselves in a dark room, we switch on our monitors and crank open Ron's database.

Speaker 18 And soon, one particular account stands out: an account which doesn't just tweet about depth, but about politics. It's not a real user, it's not a real person, that I know for sure, yes.

Speaker 18 I'm Alexei Mostrus, and this is Who Trolled Amber, episode 3, 3, Into the Dark.

Speaker 18 This is what happens.

Speaker 18 I'm looking through the Ron Schnell data to find accounts which have tweeted a lot about Johnny Depp. And one of these stands out as particularly interesting.

Speaker 18 This account isn't behaving like a typical bot account. It's not posting ads for cryptocurrencies or retweeting other people's hashtags.

Speaker 18 Instead, it posts hundreds of tweets in Spanish about Chilean politics. until November 2020, when it suddenly switches topics and starts tweeting about Johnny Depp.

Speaker 18 The account's name is Felipe Irarazaval. He says he's a graduate of the University of Chile and he has a master's degree in law.

Speaker 18 Except a couple of years after the account is created, Felipe changes his profile to say he studied commercial engineering at a completely different college. That's red flag number one.

Speaker 18 Felipe is pretty right-wing. You can see from his tweets that he's obsessed with law and order in Chile.

Speaker 18 And of course, that's not unusual in itself, but I can't find any trace of the real Felipe outside of Twitter.

Speaker 18 There are a couple of people with the same name living in Santiago who have very similar profiles, but when I contact them, they say they have nothing to do with the account.

Speaker 18 If the Twitter Felipe is a real person, then off the platform, he's a ghost. That's red flag number two.

Speaker 18 I've been studying for a while now all the dark side of digital technologies regarding politics.

Speaker 18 So that's the misinformation that's coordinated in authentic activities, such as bot networks and stuff like that.

Speaker 18 I call Professor Marcelo Santos.

Speaker 18 He's an expert in both misinformation and in Chilean politics.

Speaker 18 I want to see what he thinks of Felipe.

Speaker 17 Can you just give me your impressions of this account?

Speaker 18 Okay, first of all, a couple of things. We were talking about when...
A few years back, Marcelo was the head of this big study into political disinformation in Chile.

Speaker 18 He uncovered thousands of bots and trolls trying to manipulate public opinion before big votes. There were sets of bots or bot-like users that I called the amplifiers.

Speaker 18 They were just you know rooting for the conservative users and some other set of bots that were the polarizing bots that were rooting here and you know talking shit.

Speaker 18 Most of these suspect accounts were created just after a series of protests erupted in the country.

Speaker 18 June 2019

Speaker 18 We had this what we call the social uprising or social outburst where people went to the streets, first triggered by a raising the subway fare.

Speaker 18 The protests start with students, but end up encompassing every part of society. For weeks, the streets are alive with rioting and tension.
I believe that five subway stations were destroyed.

Speaker 18 I mean, they were burnt.

Speaker 18 So we had curfew, we had military on the streets. There were clashes with the police every day.

Speaker 18 Every Friday, we, some of us, went to this square and I'm talking that from a range from 200,000 to 1 million people with very violent repression by the police.

Speaker 18 We didn't go to the protests and so because it was really violent. Misinformation ramps up when Chile stages a referendum and then a general election.

Speaker 18 Most of the bot accounts that Marcelo identifies support right-wing candidates, and specifically one man called Jose Antonio Cast. Jose Antonio Cast is the representative of the far right.

Speaker 18 Cast had this

Speaker 18 big network of botlike activity promoting him and demoting the others. Cast is particularly opposed to a new constitution which would make Chile a much more liberal society.

Speaker 18 His posts on this topic are retweeted by a network of suspected troll and bot accounts along with a particular hashtag marking opposition to the constitution. Rechazo.
Rechaso is rejected in Spanish.

Speaker 18 Apruve is a provo. So there was a campaign of apruevo against rechaso.
So that hashtag rechaso, which appears in the user

Speaker 18 you were monitoring, is related to the right-wing sympathizers.

Speaker 18 When I look at Felipe's account, he fits this pattern exactly. He posts dozens of pro-cast tweets and he liberally uses the hashtag rechazo.

Speaker 18 To Marcelo, all of this is very suspicious.

Speaker 18 And he notices other clues about Felipe, which I'd missed, like the date that the account was created. The D-Day or the social uprise was the 18th of October.
Two days later, this account is created.

Speaker 18 So that is quite suspect.

Speaker 18 And the language used in the tweets themselves.

Speaker 18 It doesn't add up from whatever perspective you see.

Speaker 18 In Marcelo's opinion, Felipe is not who he says he is. Not a lawyer or an engineer from Santiago, but someone else entirely.

Speaker 18 Possibly someone sitting in a troll farm in Mexico or in the Philippines, being paid to secretly sway opinions online.

Speaker 18 How likely,

Speaker 18 roughly, do you think it is,

Speaker 18 from everything you know about this account, that it is

Speaker 18 some sort of inauthentic account?

Speaker 18 Oh yeah, I think it's 100% inauthentic. I have no doubt about that.

Speaker 18 Up until this point, Felipe has never tweeted about Johnny Depp or shown any interest in celebrity stories.

Speaker 18 But on November the 6th, 2020, he stops posting about the politics of Chile and out of nowhere joins the Amber Heard hate party.

Speaker 18 He starts tweeting the same hashtags in English again and again and again.

Speaker 18 It has a very low activity for a long time and then all of a sudden he has 55 tweets about you know how amber is super guilty

Speaker 18 almost all the tweets have the same structure a couple of hashtags basically hashtags like join depth is innocent amber heard is abuser and then a link for a tweet

Speaker 18 my question is if felipe was sent to stoke culture wars in chile Why would he suddenly start tweeting about a celebrity trial in the United States? Marcelo can only speculate.

Speaker 18 I have no evidence, I have just inferences. So it could be perfectly

Speaker 18 an agency in Mexico that has a lot of accounts that was hired by the right wing to do that specific work and then was hired by another agency to do that other specific work. That's not unusual.

Speaker 18 Not only is Marcelo saying that Felipe is a fake account, one of hundreds created to stoke up tensions in Chile's politics, he's suggesting that at some point at the end of 2020, the fake Felipe was repurposed, away from right-wing rabble-rousing and towards Johnny Depp.

Speaker 18 This story's horizons are broadening. What started as a celebrity story now seems to be crossing over with international politics.

Speaker 18 I suppose when it comes to online manipulation, the target doesn't really matter. Whether you want to promote a celebrity or a politician, the tools are the same.

Speaker 18 And I had one more slightly unsettling thought.

Speaker 18 If it hadn't have been for Ron's data, Felipe's activities would still be hidden. He deleted his account in 2021, wiping away all his tweets.

Speaker 18 Which raises the question, How many more Felipe's are there out there, shaping events and then covering up their tracks?

Speaker 18 I get off the call and I go and find Xavier to tell him about Marcello. As it turns out, he has found out a lot more.

Speaker 23 The first thing that I found were all these accounts posting in Thai. So normally when a tweet goes viral, you expect it to have lots of retweets, lots of likes, lots of replies.

Speaker 23 What's happening with these accounts is that they're only ever posting once about Depp. and they are getting a huge number of retweets, thousands and thousands.

Speaker 23 And the crucial bit is that the the accounts have basically no followers and barely anyone is actually engaging with the tweets. No one is replying to the tweets.

Speaker 23 So if you take a look at this one, it's congratulating Johnny Depp after the US trial. The tweet has 22,000 retweets, only 11 replies, and the account has only a couple dozen followers.

Speaker 23 Here's another one, an account which has two followers, tweets once about Depp, gets 9,000 retweets. And then this one, 6,500 retweets, no replies whatsoever.

Speaker 23 My best guess is that these accounts are being retweeted in an automated way, but by bots that are possibly not sophisticated enough to actually engage with the tweets or reply to the tweets.

Speaker 23 Another thing I found was a network of accounts tweeting about Depp and Spanish. They're all liking and retweeting the exact same anti-Amber Heard posts.

Speaker 23 And the most interesting thing I spotted in those accounts was that they would post the same tweet again and again, and the only thing they would change is the string of numbers and letters that they'd added to the end of the tweets.

Speaker 23 So show you an example here, 8th of November 2020, this account posts hundreds of identical tweets on exactly the same day, all pro-Johnny Depp, anti-Amber Heard.

Speaker 23 And the only thing that is changing in those tweets is the string of numbers and letters at the end. I talked to a disinformation expert and he said that he sees this kind of thing a lot.

Speaker 23 And what accounts are normally doing, he thinks, is trying to avoid spam filters. So they will slightly alter the tweets to get around the filters.

Speaker 23 And he actually sent me a link to a YouTube video in Arabic, which shows how you can automate this process. So I think actually with both the

Speaker 23 Thai accounts and with the Spanish accounts, what we're seeing is automation.

Speaker 18 That's amazing. I mean, I also found some really weird stuff.
There's this one account which has tweeted 370,000 times since 2021 and has liked more than 400,000 posts.

Speaker 18 I've worked out that's a post every two minutes for 24 hours a day for three years.

Speaker 18 There's this other account that's tweeted 7,000 times in a short period, wasn't following anyone at all, but it was part of a network that I found that seems to be using fake pictures.

Speaker 18 All of these pictures could be traced back to Instagram models.

Speaker 18 This network of pro-Johnny Depp accounts had taken those pictures.

Speaker 18 There was so much weird stuff. Now, I also wanted to look outside of Twitter because there's there's a lot of anti-amber hate on different platforms.

Speaker 18 I found this video on YouTube of Amber giving an interview to Access Hollywood and the video had 120,000 comments and I asked a data journalist that works at Tortos called Katie Riley to download all of those comments so we could see what was being said.

Speaker 18 She found that 60,000 of these 120,000 comments had exactly the same phrase in them. So the phrase was, she is not a victim.

Speaker 18 victim, and that exact phrase appeared in more than half of the 120,000 comments posted under this video. In my mind, there's no way that that could have happened organically.

Speaker 18 Okay, here's some of what we found. A political troll who suddenly switches allegiances to attack Amber Heard.

Speaker 18 Spanish-speaking bot networks posting hundreds of pro-dep tweets. Thai accounts which tweet once and go viral.
and tens of thousands of identical messages left under Amber Heard videos on YouTube.

Speaker 18 To me, this all points towards a global campaign.

Speaker 18 If that's right, it either means it was coordinated by someone pretty powerful, someone with access to disinformation resources in different countries, or it means that multiple people were responsible, and that these guys somehow molded together and merged with genuine depth fans to create a hybrid campaign.

Speaker 18 But our examples are still a bit piecemeal.

Speaker 18 I feel like we're standing in front of a giant screen that's shielding us from the truth, and we're poking little holes in it, trying to see through each of them one by one.

Speaker 18 When what we need is someone to pull back the whole sheet.

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Speaker 18 My wife, she's from Myanmar. We met in the United States.
A year into COVID, there was a military coup in Myanmar, and the country went into civil unrest.

Speaker 18 Johan Han has seen firsthand the impact that misinformation can have in the real world.

Speaker 18 And what happened is before the coup, the military anti in Myanmar was spreading misinformation on Facebook, but no one really caught them because they were tweeting in

Speaker 18 Burmese language, which is not analyzed by the system that Facebook built at the time. In 2018, military personnel in Myanmar created hundreds of fake accounts on Facebook.

Speaker 18 They posed as pop stars, models or other celebrities. Their aim was to secretly spread hatred against the country's Rohingya minority.

Speaker 18 Since that point, Johan's dedicated his working life to fighting misinformation and manipulation online. And now he's got some answers for us.

Speaker 18 There are some common

Speaker 18 indicators of suspicious behaviors in the entire data set.

Speaker 17 When you get a data set like this, as a misinformation researcher, what are your first steps in terms of analyzing it? Just talk us through that process.

Speaker 18 I want to look globally who is the top spriter and what tweet is the most retweeted or quoted or mentioned. From those top tweets, I start to investigate who are interacting with those tweets.

Speaker 18 As I drill down, I start to investigate different campaigns. Johan found that the dataset contains a lot of anonymous accounts.
Which means each account, they never use real

Speaker 18 names or real profiles.

Speaker 18 He also found a lot of suspicious amplification. Which is when a tweet receives far more engagement than it normally would have received.

Speaker 18 Johan is talking about accounts which have almost no followers, but when they start tweeting about Johnny Depp, they suddenly get thousands of retweets, like the Thai account Xavier found.

Speaker 18 Johan identified other indicators too, like common content. When different accounts use identical text such as hashtags or URLs to promote a certain narrative.
A change in language.

Speaker 18 Where those accounts would tweet in on one topic and suddenly they're talking about Johnny Depp. and finally spamminess

Speaker 18 they will respond to a user repeatedly or they will quote a user and add many hashtags the type of behavior that a normal user would not usually do

Speaker 18 in johan's opinion the ron schnell data is full of inauthentic activity

Speaker 18 I identified multiple campaigns. Each campaign roughly consists of hundreds to thousands of accounts.
I would say conservatively, there are at least many thousands of accounts that are inauthentic.

Speaker 18 And here's the big takeaway.

Speaker 18 Across the whole data set, I think at least 50% of tweets were generated by inauthentic accounts. This is pretty astonishing.

Speaker 18 According to Johan, 50% or more of anti-AMBAHERD tweets came from bots or trolls, either from automated accounts or from accounts pretending to be someone they're not.

Speaker 18 If that's right, it means that bots and trolls played more than a minor role in Depp VHERD.

Speaker 18 Johan's analysis suggests they were driving the debate.

Speaker 18 I should pause here to say something about dates because I think it's significant. The tweets in Ron's database date from April 2020 to January 2021.

Speaker 18 That's about 15 months before the US trial begins in Virginia.

Speaker 18 And I'm thinking, if half of all these tweets are inauthentic, that means that bots got involved well before the jury took their seats in that Virginia courtroom.

Speaker 18 It seems like someone laid the groundwork in advance of the US trial.

Speaker 18 so that by the time it began and people really started paying attention, Amber had already lost the case in the court of public opinion.

Speaker 18 Johan found something else too. The inauthentic accounts he identified, they don't just sit in their silos and encourage each other.
They get real fans involved too.

Speaker 18 I think the inauthentic accounts will start the campaign first. The bots will tweet a hashtag so much that it's picked up by Twitter's algorithms.
And then it will show on the what's trending panel.

Speaker 18 Then genuine accounts will see the hashtag trending and then they will start to engage with those tweets. But of course, Johan isn't the only person who's been looking at the data set.

Speaker 18 Kai Cheng has two, the founder of Botometer. And his conclusions appear on the surface to be a little different.

Speaker 18 I found a lot of bots, right?

Speaker 20 By a lot, I just mean the numbers, right? But compared to the total number of accounts involved in this discussion, maybe it's a small portion, but there are still a lot.

Speaker 18 To remind you, this is Johan's take. At least 50% of tweets were generated by inauthentic accounts.
Contradictory, right? But actually, I think it makes sense.

Speaker 18 What seems to have happened is that a lot of real accounts run by real people tweeted about the depth case, which is exactly what you'd expect given the insane amount of media coverage it got.

Speaker 18 But most of these genuine accounts only posted once or a couple of times, whereas the bots and the trolls were much more prolific.

Speaker 20 I see a lot of the bots that that's like super active.

Speaker 20 The content of a message are the same, right? They're just replying the same message to different accounts.

Speaker 18 That's how you can get to a situation where the majority of accounts in Ron's database were likely authentic, while the majority of tweets were not.

Speaker 18 Kai Cheng also spotted particular examples of inauthentic activity, accounts we'd never seen before, like Carlin Vincent.

Speaker 20 He has

Speaker 20 roughly 1,000 posts.

Speaker 20 All those posts are actually replies to different official accounts of brands, especially Warner Brothers, posting something like Warner Brothers support abusers such as Amber Heard, and then have the hashtag saying justice for Johnny Depp.

Speaker 20 So the same type of message 1,000 times.

Speaker 18 So that's a typical bot behavior, right? He found accounts which developed a sudden interest in the dep case out of nowhere.

Speaker 20 This one is also very interesting. If you look at the timeline, it has three stages of different behaviors.
So before 2019, it was mainly posting about Japanese anime, and then it went dormant.

Speaker 20 And then in 2020, in November, all of a sudden, these accounts start to post and retweet large amounts of pro-Jungi DAP tweets.

Speaker 20 If you hire those bots for certain purposes, these bots will start to post the account you request. When you start stop paying, then the bots stop.

Speaker 18 And here's what's really significant about what Kai Cheng found. Examples of coordinated behavior.
Suspect accounts working together to troll Amber.

Speaker 18 We identified individual accounts, but this goes a step further.

Speaker 20 I found another example, which is a group of accounts,

Speaker 20 I think based on their behavior, those are all bots. And what they do was just reply the same message.
This brand supports domestic violence against men to different brands.

Speaker 18 All these accounts tweet the same message. They send this message to anyone associated with Amber.
Her studio, Warner Bros., her main sponsor, L'Oreal, The Sun newspaper, even J.K. Rowling.

Speaker 18 Repeatedly.

Speaker 20 And usually it's on the same day. This is a typical what we call coordinated inauthentic behavior.

Speaker 18 I asked Johan to run the phrase, this brand supports domestic violence against men, through Information Tracer, his tool designed to detect social media manipulation.

Speaker 18 That night, he sends me a voice note.

Speaker 25 There are about 100 accounts generating more than 1200 tweets and retweets. that include this identical term within a matter of hours and all of those accounts look suspicious.

Speaker 18 Johan's tool shows that over a thousand identical tweets are sent in a matter of hours on the 7th of November 2020.

Speaker 18 And that's super interesting because that's not the only suspicious activity happening around this time.

Speaker 18 It's also when Felipe, the Chilean right-winger, suddenly develops his interest in depth.

Speaker 18 It's when the Japanese anime accounts and the Spanish bot accounts start tweeting hundreds of times about the case.

Speaker 18 And it's when Carlin Vincent begins relentlessly trolling companies like Warner Bros.

Speaker 18 All this activity happens in the same 48-hour period.

Speaker 18 And there's something that happens right at the beginning of this that I think might be relevant.

Speaker 18 On the 6th of November, Depp announces on Instagram that he's been fired from the Fantastic Beasts movie, a week after losing the UK trial.

Speaker 18 Why was there so much coordinated bot activity in the 48 hours following this announcement? Was this just an angry fan creating a bot campaign on his home computer?

Speaker 18 Or was this Depp's team launching a fight back against the judgment?

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Speaker 18 In the early 19th century, a French criminal called Eugène-François Vidoc decided to become a private detective. Vidoc was possibly the world's first ever example of a sleuth.

Speaker 18 He went on to found France's first criminal investigative agency, and his story inspired several writers, including Victor Hugo.

Speaker 18 He also pioneered the use of agent provocateurs, secret agents who would go undercover to encourage suspects to commit a crime.

Speaker 18 And that's how I've come to see the bots and trolls in the Amber Heard case.

Speaker 18 They didn't create all the hate towards her, but they were in the mix, stoking things up, encouraging and inciting ugly elements which were already present.

Speaker 18 making sure that by the time you became aware of the story, your social media feed was already filled with one-sided vitriol.

Speaker 18 I feel like I've learned a lot from Johan and Kaicheng. We've got much closer to answering the question of what happened.
But that still leaves the other question, who trolled Amber?

Speaker 18 Who commissioned these bots and trolls in the first place?

Speaker 18 Ron's dataset has given us almost too many leads. It shows that the campaign against Amber has come from all over the world.

Speaker 18 I feel a bit stuck, so I do what I normally do when I need an answer. I ring Daniel Mackey, the former spy who put me on this story in the first place.

Speaker 18 How are you? Happy New Year. Happy New Year.
I'm good. I'm very well.
I mean, I'm... Work stress is work stress, but you know, life is overall pretty good.

Speaker 18 Basically, the top line from Johan, one of the researchers, was that in his opinion more than half of all the tweets in the database using anti-umber heard hashtag tags were posted by inauthentic accounts

Speaker 18 wow wow and what um what led him to that conclusion and that doesn't surprise me in the slightest but it's it uh that's interesting that's a substantial finding both Johan and Kai Cheng found suspicious behavior across the entire data set.

Speaker 18 Maybe I can go through a couple of examples quickly. Yeah, absolutely.
There were quite a few repurposed accounts that they found. Right.

Speaker 18 So the accounts are either being leveraged by the same actor, working for different clients, or they were being bought and sold and used by different actors.

Speaker 18 That is bread and butter disinformation, inauthentic activity.

Speaker 18 And then they found something that they called specifically coordinated inauthentic behavior. So there was this network of accounts that posted exactly the same same message about Amber Heard being

Speaker 18 a thousand times in one day or whatever. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. It was literally actually, you got it almost bang on it.
It's like a thousand two hundred times on one particular day.

Speaker 18 These guys that you got to do this analysis sound like they know what they're doing. That's uh, that's how we used to do that analysis back in back in my old life.
That's that's pretty cool.

Speaker 18 That's like very validating to hear that because this is the theory that we discussed a while back.

Speaker 18 And so to hear that their analysis so directly speaks to the thing that we were in our gut saying, this looks really weird. And like, yeah, that's, that's really satisfying to hear that, to be honest.

Speaker 18 If, if more than 50% of overall conversation is potentially inauthentic or coming from inauthentic sources, does that suggest to you that it is significantly higher than the sort of level of bot activity that you would normally expect to see?

Speaker 18 Absolutely. 100%.
We're looking at something here that feels beyond just the general din of the crowded bar.

Speaker 18 This is somebody getting up on stage, ripping off their pants, throwing eggs at people in the audience.

Speaker 18 I suppose a related question, do you think that this sort of inauthentic activity would have the power to influence the real world debate? 100%.

Speaker 18 Absolutely. I mean, this was a case that was in part prosecuted in the Court of Public Opinion.
It was a sort of modern-day

Speaker 18 OJ or Lewinsky situation where these new media platforms are being used. Even in my personal life, I had people flagging.

Speaker 18 I saw this and I saw this piece of content or whatever, and they show it to me and I go, that is inauthentic.

Speaker 18 Why it is so divisive is because it takes natural human interaction, social connection, and community making, and it basically amplifies the interests of a few specific parties.

Speaker 18 It's actually fundamentally anti-democratic. It's truly, it is like pouring gasoline on a fire.

Speaker 18 Okay, so here's an idea.

Speaker 18 You should look into other inauthentic campaigns. I'm willing to bet that if you look at other inauthentic campaigns, you will find that there are commonalities between them and this one.

Speaker 18 None of what these guys have done here is reinventing the wheel. The internet is mostly imitative rather than iterative.

Speaker 18 And so by examining who they're imitating, you might actually be able to narrow down who's running this.

Speaker 18 As soon as I get off the phone, I start to look for other cases. I want to find one where online bots have imposed themselves onto a narrative.

Speaker 18 That's when I come across one of the weirdest stories I've ever heard.

Speaker 18 And I didn't expect it would give me a clue about who trolled Amber.

Speaker 18 Turns out, I was wrong.

Speaker 18 Next time on Who Trolled Amber, we go through the looking glass.

Speaker 18 I call it my Alice in wonderland life since it started a homicide case gives us new clues do you think that anyone connected to you might have

Speaker 18 paid for

Speaker 18 bots or trolls to support your case yeah i think so yeah

Speaker 18 and a former fbi agent raises an intriguing possibility they want to showcase the failures of the u.s

Speaker 22 that's why you would have state actors or other groups in this this is a propaganda war.

Speaker 18 We contacted Johnny Depp while making this podcast, but he didn't respond. Thank you for listening to Who Trolled Amber.

Speaker 18 Who Trolled Amber is written and reported by me, Alexi Mostris, and by Xavia Greenwood. The producer is Xavier Greenwood.
Additional reporting by Katie Riley. Sound design is by Carla Patella.

Speaker 18 The narrative editor is Gary Marshall. The editor is David Taylor.

Speaker 18 Thank you for listening to Who Tolled Amber. 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.

Speaker 18 While you wait for next week's episode, search for Tortoise and hear more from our award-winning newsroom wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 18 You can binge the entire series by subscribing to Tortoise Plus or the Tortoise app.

Speaker 18 Tortoise

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