Faculty Research Fellows Talk with Adrian Daub

Adrian Daub: "Learning Digital Anti-Feminism: Depp v. Heard, YouTube and How Platforms Shape What Counts as 'Evidence'"

The court case Depp v. Heard took place in the spring of 2022, and in legacy media both online and offline it dominated headlines during that period. This talk will present a very different reception and afterlife of the trial: on the video platforms YouTube and TikTok, Depp v. Heard remained current and remained a part of debate far longer and became a site for interaction and antifeminist radicalization. Using upload counts, viewership numbers and comments over time, Daub will discuss that YouTube users lived with Depp v. Heard for a much longer time period than people consuming news about the trial elsewhere. He will present that the stakes on YouTube especially were very different: using topic modeling and collocation analysis on a corpus of over a million YouTube comments, he will show how YouTube commenters learned (and taught each other) how to agree on salient data points from the hundreds of hours of trial footage (which were entirely different from the data points usually rehearsed outside of these platforms). They taught each other how to extrapolate from these data points and make more abstract claims about “women” and #MeToo. And they taught each other specific techniques of disbelief. Those techniques of disbelief drew on the affordances of the social media age, but they likewise demonstrate striking continuities with very old modes of objectification and epistemic destabilization of subaltern groups.

Adrian Daub is Professor of the Humanities, Professor of German Studies and of Comparative Literature, and Director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research.

Clayman Faculty Affiliates are welcome to attend the lunch seminars.  All Stanford academics are eligible to become Clayman Institute Faculty Affiliates.