Toxic fans made Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s trial inevitable

You don’t imagine everything. The internet is completely submerged, flooded with memes, supercuts, livestreams, fancams and conspiracy theories about the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard defamation trials.

Testing is part of the process Legal battle between two actors. In May 2016, Amber Heard filed for divorce and in 2018 she wrote Washington Post op-ed about being a sexual assault survivor. Depp is not named in the piece, but in 2019 he filed a defamation lawsuit against Heard. A year later, she filed an objection, and the trial is now taking place both in court in Fairfax County, Virginia, and on live streams on platforms like YouTube and Twitch.

The experiment created a toxic bomb for the fandom, as major social platforms encouraged the worst possible human behavior to boost their engagement stat. And transparent Depp v. Heard, the defense, ugliness, and outrage cycle of online fan communities has infected every nook and cranny of the site like a virus, taking the shape of content that performs well on those platforms. . It has become a new meta for Twitch, Washington Post reported, which flooded the platform’s “Chat Only” page with live streams and reaction streams. And on TikTok, the hashtag #justiceforjohnnydepp on the app has nearly 7 billion views, each Recent reports of Rolling Stone. There are professional makeup tutorials for Depp, fancams that throw adorable filters on clips of his testimony, and super-short cuts intended to make Amber look unstable.

Fandom is not new – you can follow it all the way back reading club because the Sherlock Holmes. But fandom in the internet age has varying degrees of intensity and coordination. Social media has turned it into something closer to online gangs or cults, protecting and controlling each other instead of the censorship that actually happens on major platforms like Facebook or Twitter. In fact, these platforms have spent years rewarding and training users to act like a swarm, share connected content with their favorite actors and brands, and go to war with each other to gain influence.

Social media’s reaction to Depp v. Heard is the most recent example – although it feels particularly inevitable compared to previous online fan movements. This doesn’t sound like a proper corner of the website screaming into the void. It feels popular. It has turned into what Emmi Conley, a researcher specializing in online propaganda, calls a proxy culture war, where fandoms support both Heard and Depp is using actors as prototypes in a referendum on the #MeToo movement.

“People are watching it like a sport. Obsessed about it. Make GIFs and memes about it. You’ll find the conversation isn’t about male victims of domestic violence or resources for survivors of abuse,” she says.

But how did we get here? Conley points to the Tumblr porn ban as a potential inflection point for internet fandom. After a mass migration of around 150 million users, following the site’s controversial ban on NSFW Content 2018Twitter has become new home base for fandom content. And the site’s very different incentives around going viral and interacting have dramatically changed the way fandoms interact with each other.

“They are hardly in their circles anymore. Now, one of the coolest things that can happen to a fandom is being seen. They want to see themselves on the trending page,” Conley said, pointing to how K-pop fandoms try to dominate the site. “Like everything else on sites like Twitter, fandom on the major social media platforms is not about mutual interest or topics (as it used to be on blogs or forums) but about volume, ” she said.

Depp fans were active on Twitter in early 2019 when Depp filed an allegation lawsuit against Heard. At the time, fans of the DC cinematic universe and Zack Snyder’s Alliance justice is hosting a #ReleaseTheSnyderCut fan campaign on Reddit and Twitter. Snyder fans believe that a different version of the movie already exists – rather than the one remade and remade by Joss Whedon – and they are campaigning around the internet to pressure Warner Bros. release it. Although Snyder fans were later vindicated with an actual full Snyder Cut release, they notoriously toxic and entitled. After Depp filed the lawsuit, they started beg for Heard removed from DC movies like Alliance justice and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, side with Depp and believe that messy divorce proceedings and defamation lawsuits could jeopardize their chances of seeing these movies.

But the trial has since found audiences in other corners of the internet. Jessica Lucas, UK-based digital culture researcher and journalist, told Polygon: “I think TikTok has brought it into the national consciousness.

Lucas said when the trial began in April, TikTok users were obsessed with it because of the site’s pre-existing love of true crime. “There are many examples of viral ‘investigation’ conducted by TikTok sluths, and in this case TikTok will be the judge and jury, which is why it is, unfortunately, become so popular,” she said, pointing out TikTok’s analogy of Gabby Petito’s disappearance, “couch guy“And try to cheat West Elm Caleb.

TikTok, perhaps more powerfully than any other social platform on the web, emphasizes content that can be relevant to subcultures and fandoms – to the point of company blog in 2021 declares that subcultures are the “new demographic”. Plus, every feature is shareable or remixable, which means not only the video can trend, but also the audio in it, recorded movements, wearable fashion, and hashtags with # tagged.

“Users can take something pretty serious and remix it, shred it to fit their story, add music and effects – i.e. zoom in, close the shot – for a complete change. tone of what’s going on in the courtroom,” Lucas said. “Everybody compiles their own cases, arguments, and evidence and presents it in a way that suits their end goal.”

Meanwhile, live streams of the trial have become hugely popular on YouTube and Twitch. A channel called LawandCrimeNetwork even simulation the testing on both platforms. And like the Washington Post sharp also, major streamers like Hasan Piker and Imane “Pokimane” Anys are now streaming it to their millions of viewers. And the act of participating in a trial like Depp v. Heard and delivering it through Twitch’s aesthetic is jarring, if not downright inhuman. For example, streamer and professional gamer Félix Lengyel, aka xQc, perform title last week for putting a “cry counter” on the screen to count how many times Heard had shed tears during his testimony.

Image: YouTube / xQcOW

According to Casey Holmes, a streamer from Austin, Texas who goes by the name LucidFoxx, it’s no surprise that the trial is popular on the platform. Holmes told Polygon: “All are heterosexuals. “And I think because people know who Amber Heard is and know who Johnny Depp is, which makes them look like, I don’t know, maybe it’s the contrived idea that they’re adjusting to this trial, Who are these people . ”

At the end of April, an explosion of TikTok content and live-streaming videos of the beta also reached Reddit. Subreddits like r/MadeMeSmile which are usually very healthy start filling up with ridiculous try at the re-editing of the trial as an inspirational story for Depp.

“There is some kind of disconnect,” Amanda Brennan, former chief editor of Tumblr and current trends analyst for XX Artists, told Polygon. “It just doesn’t feel real to everyone.”

Brennan said she’s been bothered by what she’s seen online over the past few months. She says users are treating Depp, the real person, like he’s one of her characters. “There’s no plot about where Johnny Depp ends and his characters begin,” she said. “There’s a lot of these memes that I’ve seen that have people wearing Jack Sparrow cosplay, that – that got me thinking a lot.”

Brennan also sees experimental memes as an endpoint of a certain type of online social marketplace. “You have your super internet people who live in a gangster world like this, ‘Oh, this is my fandom. This is what makes me happy and who I am, I have to protect my son. I have to protect this person I care so much about. ‘ But it’s not necessarily who they’re interested in,” she said.

Social platforms have greatly encouraged celebrity tarnishing with the characters they play and with the fandom and community built around them, as the explosion of fan activity fuels only number of interactions between streamers and content creators. Brennan said: “It was sad to see. “Identified with this person who may have done very terrible things to other people, and has done very terrible things to them.”

“It’s an efficient fandom,” Brennan said.