How YouTube shaped perceptions surrounding the Depp v. Heard trial
Our historical moment is shaped by a tension between social media and legacy media, but the media that influence our lives and politics almost always live off the interplay between the two. How does this situation influence the way stories about gendered violence are reported? How does it influence the way they are remembered? These are some of the questions tackled In a recent Faculty Research Fellows talk at the Clayman Institute by Director Adrian Daub, the J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor of the Humanities and a professor of comparative literature and German studies. Using the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp defamation trial as his focus, Daub looked specifically at the role YouTube played in seeding and disseminating anti-feminist rhetoric.
Working with fellow Clayman Institute researchers – Executive Director Alison Dahl Crossley and Research Director Bethany J. Nichols – Daub found that coverage surrounding the Depp v. Heard trial on YouTube was deeply steeped in both backlash to the #MeToo movement and digital anti-feminism more broadly. According to Daub, YouTube content didn’t tend to be about false information or disinformation. It aimed at something else: the platform taught audiences a particular way of interpreting the facts presented to them. He posited that the social media frenzy around the trial was never about not believing one woman exclusively, but about doubting women in general. It was about teaching others how to doubt.
Daub and his colleagues analyzed all comments from hundreds of YouTube videos with Amber Heard or Johnny Depp in the title. Their sentiment analyses focused on positive sentiments, negative sentiments, and compounded sentiments. What they found was that while the sentiments were not as negative as one might think, sentiment was particularly lopsided when used in conjunction with Johnny Depp. Much of this was attributed to fan culture – online discussions largely ignored the facts of the case, and became about the fact that commenters liked Depp or his movies.
But although commenters’ understanding of the case had everything to do with Depp’s celebrity, commenters also seemed eager to draw broader inferences from the trial. Within a corpus of 1.3 million words, non-specific descriptors predominated over outright invective ones. For instance, the words “woman” (82,760) and “Heard” (58,576) come up far more frequently than “bitch” (3,225) or “scamber” (1,092). Part of this is likely due to YouTube’s more stringent content moderation policies, but some of it seems to have to do with a more subtle, more epistemically based, misogyny. For one thing, psychological terms predominated (diagnosing Heard with “borderline personality disorder” rather than calling her a “liar”, for instance). For another, comments often leveraged Heard’s looks as a basis for their evidence of whether or not she was guilty. This is where the anti-feminist intentions begin to emerge, setting a new and harmful precedent for digital discourse around the trial.
The focus of this rhetoric, Daub discovered, was on questioning women’s mental stability, believability, and intentions. Words relating to enacting abuse were far more likely to appear in comments featuring mentions of Amber Heard, and words relating to personal struggles and traumas more likely to appear in comments featuring mentions of Johnny Depp. This suggests that there was a consistently misogynistic picture being painted, which the social media platform only encouraged. There is a dual risk at work here, Daub contended: Trials like Depp v. Heard are in danger of being viewed through fandom and anti-fandom lenses; which in turn allows for anti-feminist narratives to thrive under the guise of fan loyalty.
