A study recently published by Bot Sentinel, a portal dedicated to analyzing possible cases of disinformation and harassment on the Internet, indicates that both Amber Heard and those who publicly showed their support for the actress on social networks suffered “one of the worst cases of cyberbullying and blatant abuse of a group of Twitter accounts ever seen” following the media libel trial against Johnny Depp. After analyzing more than 14,000 tweets with the hashtags #AmberHeardIsAnAbuser, #AmberHeardIsALiar or one of the versions maliciously written to increase the number of trending topics, they came to several conclusions involving trolls, fake accounts and selective harassment of women.
The study points this out 24% of accounts tweeting using those hashtags were created in the past seven months, when the average number of fake or bot accounts that tend to occupy trending topics is 8.6%. They also found that, of all certified accounts, 627 only wrote about Amber Heard and her fans, and always in a negative way. Trolls trying to amplify the message against Heard used tactics like copy and paste or “spamming hashtags” to give the impression that the public was overwhelmingly on their side and thus silence any conversation in favor of the actress. “Aquaman”.
Things get pretty dark when they focus on tweets in support of Amber Heard. In addition to replying to every pro-Amber Heard tweet with a slew of negative replies, most of those replies have been used. “vulgar and threatening language”. But they point to one of the most disgusting cases of harassment they’ve encountered, addressed to a woman who defended the actress and who was attacked by trolls by creating a fake Twitter account with the image of the woman’s deceased son, and subsequently harassed other members of his family. Many of the users who wrote in support of Heard have also received death threats against themselves and family members, including minors.
Twitter did nothing
In his conclusions, Bot Sentinel points out that Twitter “It hasn’t done enough to mitigate platform manipulation and has done little to stop abuse and targeted harassment.”, and they continue to do nothing despite the fact that this harassment continues weeks after the trial ends. The website adds that Amber Heard’s team hired them in 2020 to analyze whether messages against her on social networks came from real people or fake accounts. The professional relationship between Heard and the portal ended that year, once their analysis was submitted, and this new relationship is completely unrelated to Amber Heard or Johnny Depp. It was the Bot Sentinel team itself that wanted to analyze the impact of the process on Twitter.
Source: E Cartelera
