Who Trolled Amber? - Who Trolled Amber: Episode 5 - The special relationship

Episode Date: March 19, 2024

Could a nation state have deployed an online army to fight for Johnny Depp? Alexi discovers the curious relationship between the Hollywood star and an authoritarian world leader.The first five episodes are now available and further episodes will be released weekly. To listen to the whole series become a Tortoise member or subscribe to Tortoise+.To find out more about Tortoise:Download the Tortoise app - for a listening experience curated by our journalistsSubscribe to Tortoise+ on Apple Podcasts for early access and ad-free contentBecome a member and get access to all of Tortoise's premium audio offerings and moreIf you want to get in touch with us directly about a story, or tell us more about the stories you want to hear about contact [e-mail] and host: Alexi MostrousProducer and reporter: Xavier GreenwoodEditor: David TaylorNarrative editor: Gary MarshallAdditional reporting: Katie Riley Sound design: Karla Patella Artwork: Jon Hill & Oscar Ingham Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Every veteran has a story. Whatever your next chapter, get support with health, education, finance and more. At veterans.gc.ca slash services. A message from the Government of Canada. Hello, it's Claudia here, host of the Slow Newscast from Tortoise. 30 years ago, peace in the Middle East seemed like a real possibility. That's hard to believe given what's going on in Gaza and Israel right now. Donald McIntyre reported from the region

for decades and this week across three episodes he explores how peace was left behind through the story and career of one man, Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu. To listen search the Slow Newscast wherever you get your podcasts. Just a warning before we start, this series contains strong language and descriptions of violence. Before we start, this series contains strong language and descriptions of violence. It's just the truth is stranger than fiction side of the way the world works. You know, you couldn't make this up if you tried. Attribution has always been the hardest part of this story. Working out who trolled Amber, not just what happened to her. And to be fair, that is what everyone told us.

Are we going to get a smoking gun? No, you will never find a smoking gun to this. I guarantee you. Oftentimes attribution is in a definitive way is impossible. It wasn't like I'm going to go hire this particular influencer to do this type of work. By this point, a few months into our investigation, Johan and Kai Cheng, the data scientists, have finished their analysis. Their evidence suggests that bots and trolls played a significant role in DepVeHerd. Johan concluded that at least half the tweets he looked at were inauthentic,

and Xavier and I found specific examples of orchestrated hate coming from all around the world. When you think that there was nothing to stop the jury going online during the Dept. Hurt trial, and you throw in the witness intimidation and the real-time trolling of Amber's experts, there's a good argument that she didn't get a fair trial. I think that's scary in itself. If domestic abuse victims and their witnesses think that they'll be trashed online before a court case, that's yet another disincentive for them to speak out.

But I still find myself obsessing over the question of who. Who was behind the bots we found? Was it someone directly connected to DEP or someone independent with their own motives? I wasn't sure we were ever going to get an answer, but then we came across the Cameron Heron case, and that's when I found the pro-Johnny Depp accounts connected to Saudi Arabia. Accounts which I think might reveal at least part of the answer. I'm Alexi Mostros and this is Who Trolled Amber. Episode 5 The Special Relationship. Mark Owen Jones is an academic and disinformation expert. He's been looking into bots for as long as anyone, and his specialty is the Middle East.

So what you've seen over the past five, six years, there's been a rise in competition between Mohammed bin Salman, who's the crown prince of Saudi, who's a dual factor ruler, Mohammed bin Zayed, who's the ruler of the UAE. They have this kind of new vision of politics in the region. And in order to try and get people on board with that and to convince people of that, they've invested a lot in digital infrastructure. Mark is particularly interested in Saudi Arabia, where Twitter is huge. Over half of the country's population is on the site.

With Twitter being so popular, it's no surprise that the authoritarian Saudi government wants to control it. If they see something they don't like, they change it. You have a Twitter trend that's critical of the ruling family. You, as an engineer working for the Ministry of Whatever, will be like, how can we get that trend to decrease? Well, the answer is always, well, we just replace it with other trends, so we get other trends to increase. So that will include the use of fake accounts like bots. In 2018, the New York Times revealed that the Saudi government ran its own troll farm, employing hundreds of people to attack critics and dissidents.

Workers at the troll farm were paid about $3,000 a month. They had to post a set number of tweets every day and they had a list of targets given to them by the government. These human trolls worked hand in hand with bots. Let's say one of the trolls posted a tweet praising the Saudi government. That tweet would then be retweeted by thousands of automated accounts. The Saudi government trolls grew so widespread that disinformation experts started calling them the flies. Electronic flyers, the verb electronic, is the term used by many in the Gulf to describe bots, electronic flies.

The fly's most infamous attack came in 2018 following the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist. Khashoggi was a big critic of the Saudi regime and its leader, Mohammed bin Salman, a man universally known as MBS. It is becoming a one-man rule. He has control of everything. He is creating an environment of intimidation and fear. On the 2nd of October 2018, Khashoggi was lured into the Saudi embassy in Turkey. He was ambushed and strangled by a 15-member squad of Saudi operatives. Initially, the Saudi government said that his death was a result of a fight. The brutal truth would have remained secret if Turkish intelligence officers hadn't recorded the whole thing.

These tapes, which documented Khashoggi's murder in real time, implicated the Saudi state. After they emerged, the Saudis blamed rogue government officials for the murder, but US intelligence reached a different conclusion. Breaking news tonight on a very dark subject, the murder of American-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, specifically whether the de facto Saudi ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, ordered the killing.

The CIA has concluded the answer is yes. In this febrile atmosphere, with the reputation of the country on the line, thousands of pro-Saudi bots swarmed onto Twitter. This was revealed in an exclusive NBC report overnight. Bots trying to sway the conversation over what happened to Jamal Khashoggi. They posted hashtags like this. Unfollow enemies of the nation. Message of love for Mohammed bin Salman. Campaign to close down the channel of Discord. hashtags like this.

One Arabic hashtag, translating as We all have trust in Mohammed bin Salman, featured in 250,000 tweets. At this point in our interview, I decide to showmark the Saudi accounts I've discovered. The ones which today present themselves as genuine Johnny Depp fan accounts, posting thousands of messages in English about the actor, but which have deleted hundreds of other tweets posted earlier in Arabic. Tweets that to me look a lot like the ones sent by the electronic flies in 2019 after the Khashoggi killing....verses from the Quran, but most of the tweets are about Saudi itself and promoting Saudi. So in 2021 this account is tweeting things like...

May God have mercy on King Abdullah. Vision 2030, a vital society, flower economy, ambitious homeland. Vision 2030, by the way, is the name for the Saudi government's ambitious plan to transform the country Well, here's another Glorious home the crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. We are with you. May God protect you I wasn't sure what mark was going to say about these tweets Middle-eastern Twitter looks totally different to British or American Twitter, at least to me. Maybe these posts are not actually that unusual, but it turns out that Mark finds the accounts as suspicious as I do.

The usual tells that you've identified are pretty accurate. So for example you talk about how some of these accounts don't have a consistent tweeting history. They seem to shift from very very different topics on a fairly organized way that they, for example, weren't tweeting about Johnny Depp and suddenly that was all they talked about. In some cases, you've seen previous interactions with those accounts that indicate that that account was run by someone else who doesn't appear to align with the current identity but pro Johnny Stan.

The language change now, a lot of the Johnny Depp stuff is in English whereas previously they appeared to have been tweeting Arabic. One of them appeared to be tweeting what looked like aphorisms. So in Arabic sometimes you see tweets that have all the, as a linguistic point, all the vowel markers which is very uncommon for normal people to do in Arabic unless they're tweeting excerpts from the Quran. I didn't know what to make of these tweets about the Quran when I first saw them, but Mark says it's another sign of bot activity. So what you tend to see in a lot of automated accounts in the Arab world is that they just,

whilst they're not doing anything, they just tweet out Quranic prose. And so it looks like some of the accounts that you've identified were doing that and then were repurposed. The fact that they'd devote almost all their tweets to promoting Johnny Depp is also suspicious. And some of them have also interacted with what looked like marketing firms that sell marketing services. There's also what I call the old few phenomenon where you have a sort of disjuncture between the account creation date and the amount of tweets produced.

A lot of these pro-Depp accounts seem to tweet a lot about that, although they're really old. And actually what that tends to mean is that the account was probably hacked. We purpose had all the tweets deleted and then started afresh with this new identity. Those Twitter accounts that you've identified appear to exhibit what I would say are indications that they have been a rented bot network or a for hire propaganda network. Mark thinks that these accounts are part of a paid for bot network directed in the middle of 2023 to support DEP. But we've found bots before in Thailand and in Spain. So here's my next question.

Does Mark think that this bot network is linked to the Saudi state? Could the Saudis have used bots to support Johnny Depp? Using some of these propaganda social media resources, marketing resources to boost Johnny Depp is absolutely something that you'd expect to see. And I think it completely makes sense in the context of golf politics. It wouldn't be an unrealistic thing to assume. On the contrary, I think it would be something that wouldn't surprise me, to be honest. Okay, so this is a curveball. The Saudi Johnny Depp accounts look like they used to be pro-government bots. The deleted tweets, the similar hashtags, the support for the regime.

All of this suggests that some of the Saudi flies were redirected, away from domestic politics and towards trolling Amber Heard. It's not something that's ever been reported or even hinted at before, but there's still the question of motive. How credible can this theory be unless Saudi had a reason to support Johnny Depp? I think back to E.J. Hilbert, the former FBI agent. His theory is that authoritarian states have a political incentive to provoke culture wars in other countries. And I suppose that fits here. Depthi Hurd has become a symbol to some people of how the MeToo movement has gone too far.

How just because a woman makes an accusation doesn't mean you have to believe her. A country like Saudi Arabia that still treats men and women so differently may have a motive to promote that message but this still feels a bit far-fetched like I'm trying to fit a jigsaw piece into a space that isn't quite right. So I go back to the Saudi accounts to see if I can find any more clues and that's when I see the pictures and the videos of Johnny Depp in Saudi Arabia. Watching a Metallica concert,

being shown around an ancient city, attending a film festival. And he's saying really nice things about the country too. I believe that what's happening here in Saudi with regards to various expressive outlets, everything is opening up sort of beautifully. I've been looking for a geopolitical motive, but actually Saudi Arabia and Johnny Depp

seem bound by something more straightforward, friendship. Every veteran has a story. Whatever your next chapter, get support with health, host of the Slow Newscast from Tortoise. Thirty years ago, peace in the Middle East seemed like a real possibility. That's hard to believe, given what's going on in Gaza and Israel right now. Donald McIntyre reported from the region for decades. And this week, across three episodes, he explores how peace was left behind through the story and career of one man, Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu.

To listen, search the Slow News cast wherever you get your podcasts. When Depp won his case against Amber Heard in 2022, his career didn't exactly bounce back. This is a major bugbear of Depp supporters. They can't understand why Hollywood isn't rushing to apologise to the actor, why he's not on the red carpet anymore. But Depp getting shot out of Hollywood left an opening. The International Film Festival, also known as Red Sea IFF, today announced through the Red Sea Film Foundation

that they are backing the upcoming French period drama Jean de Berry. In January 2023, Saudi Arabia's Red Sea Film Foundation announces that it's helping finance Depp's comeback movie. A few months later, Jean de Barry opens the Cannes Film Festival. Depp and the Saudi-backed movie receive a seven-minute standing ovation. It's a startling return to the world stage, even if Depp doesn't see it that way. I keep wondering about the word comeback because it didn't go anywhere. The Red Sea Film Foundation is now spending money on Depp's next movie, a film about the artist Modigliani.

It's a blossoming creative and commercial relationship. And in some ways, it makes sense. In the last few years, Saudi Arabia has invested trillions of dollars trying to move away from oil and increase its global influence. And let's be clear, it's not just Depp who benefits from Saudi cash. The director Guy Ritchie received Saudi funds for his upcoming movie, and Will Smith, the actor, was paid to attend a film festival and to promote the country online. So on one level, you can see Dep as part of this bigger transformation happening to the

whole country. But actually, Dep's connections to Saudi Arabia appear to go far deeper. You know, you just could never have imagined that this would be a relationship that would blossom. That's Bradley Hope. He's a former Wall Street Journal reporter who now runs a podcast studio in London. And he's written a book about MBS called Blood and Oil. He's a surprisingly complex person. On one hand ruthless and strategic, on the other hand sometimes even exhibiting the behaviour of like a young teenager, really into video

games and hanging out with his friends late into the night, even to this day. What other character traits define him? I think a kind of characteristic that you might find in like a Silicon Valley founder, a really strong belief in himself and in the idea that he could make things happen through his own efforts. Another thing that I find interesting about him is that he's portrayed as emotional and volatile and unstable and things like that. But I actually think from all of the things he's done exhibits the exact opposite.

He's actually very cool under pressure. And ruthless. Ruthless. Certainly ruthless. I mean, he's very ruthless in that he was willing to... To say MBS is controversial would be to understate it. Since becoming Crown Prince in 2017, the first millennial ruler of Saudi Arabia has enacted several liberal reforms. But he's also been accused of locking up dissidents, ramping up executions and trampling on human rights. He was specifically implicated in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

MBS, by the way, has said he takes responsibility for Khashoggi's death, but has denied any personal involvement. I'd say overall that MBS is probably not the sort of person you'd naturally become mates with. And yet somehow, Johnny Depp seems to have done just that. He first traveled there last year, soon after John DuBerry finished filming. And then some of the bigger trips took place and they went on for weeks and they involved seeing everything from the Royal palaces where MBS lives to the Al Ula kind of cultural center that they're building in the mountainous region.

Out on the yacht. You know, MBS has a big yacht, actually a collection of yachts that kind of travel together as a floating complex. And the people around Johnny said to me that when he goes to Saudi Arabia, it's actually kind of like a detox. So it's like eating amazing food. These royal palaces, they have all the world's best chefs fly in all the time. It's that sort of lifestyle. According to Bradley, Depp and MBS have more in common than you might think. They both had been through what they had felt

was a bruising, harrowing mistreatment by the global media and by the establishment. So in Johnny Depp's case, he felt like Hollywood turned its back on him. Despite him being one of the greatest moneymakers for these companies, they turned their backs on him. And they embraced the other side of the story without really hearing his side of the story.

And then with MBS, it's kind of similar. He thought the whole world turned its back on him without ever trying to fully comprehend what had happened or even who Shoji was to him, to Saudi Arabia. And also, nobody really took his word for it when he said, I didn't order the killing of Jamal Shoji, but I take responsibility for his death. Did Depp ask questions about Khashoggi? My understanding is that by the time Johnny Depp and MBS became quite close and that the relationship had gained some strength and some resilience, that Johnny Depp said, you

got to tell me about this Khashoggi affair. And the MBS didn't react with it with anger or anything. He said, let's go through the whole case. And he proceeded to walk him through how they understood Hoshioji, what the evidence they had about him. Basically saying, listen, we had our eye on him. We were concerned with him. We wanted to arrest him. But somebody from my team went too far and did something that I didn't endorse. And now I carry the weight of it on my shoulders, but I didn't say to my team go and kill Jamal Shoji. I told them arrest him. And how would you classify their relationship today?

I think it's a friendship is the best way to describe it. What they both believe to be a lifelong relationship has begun. And I think we'll be seeing Johnny Depp go to Saudi Arabia a lot over the coming years. way to describe it. What they both believe to be a lifelong relationship has begun. And I think we'll be seeing Johnny Depp go to Saudi Arabia a lot over the coming years. There have been some unlikely friendships over the years. The basketball player Dennis Robman used to hang out with Kim Yong Un. What do you actually talk about with a, and I don't mean this insultingly, a madman murderous dictator?

Actually, you talk about basketball. Steven Seagal, the star of Under Siege, has a famous friendship with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. He is one of the greatest world leaders and one of the greatest presidents in the world. But even that's not quite as surreal as hearing that Captain Jack Sparrow and an authoritarian leader in Saudi are buddies. Of all the things I expected to discover making this podcast, this was not one of them. I want to talk to Bradley about one more thing.

I'd like to hear what he thinks about the Saudi accounts I found, the ones that suddenly turned into Johnny Depp fans after years of tweeting pro-government messages. My first reaction is it looks like these are totally from the flies. This is the Saudi Ministry of Flies accounts. Bradley thinks that these Saudi accounts are part of the fly army. This doesn't mean that MBS sat down and personally decided to unleash the flies against Amber Heard. An order to deploy them may not have come from the top. Somehow or another it became known that MBS had a new fascination with Johnny Depp

and that he wanted to quote help him in some way. They just sort of reflect the kind of quirky way things work there somebody gets with or gets The idea that this is the agenda now and it becomes a sanctioned message to send through the fly's channels I've spent months doubting that i'd ever be able to find out who was behind any of the anti-Amber bots. But after speaking to Bradley and to Mark, I think that's changed. Several things point towards part of the hate campaign against Amber Heard coming from Twitter users connected to the Saudi government.

Pro Johnny Depp accounts which tweet in English but have deleted hundreds of Arabic tweets praising the Saudi government. A history of Saudi Arabia using bots to promote its interests. A financial link between Johnny Depp and Saudi Arabia. And finally, an apparently close friendship between Depp and the Saudi leader himself. To me, the evidence is convincing. I wanted to put all this to the Saudis so I emailed the embassy. I'm still waiting to hear back. But there was something still nagging me. All the Saudi accounts we found began tweeting about Dep and Herd either during or after the US trial.

So they don't really explain all the online hate published before the trial. All the tweets collected by Ron Schnell, all the YouTube videos with identical comments, all the Thai and the Spanish accounts. Saudi Arabia might be part of the answer to who trolled Amber, but it can't explain everything. The dates don't quite match up. So Xavier and I go back to the beginning. Who else had means, motive and opportunity? He was almost like Depp's consigniari. He was liaising, I think, with the main lawyers. And our attention falls on a man whose name

keeps coming up in this investigation, someone who was right by Depp's side throughout both the UK and the US trials. Do you currently represent John C. Depp II? I do. Someone whose name was all over Ron Schnell's data set. 25% of all the negative tweets posted about Amber Heard. 25%, one in four mentioned this lawyer.

A man with troubling connections. This really rather unheard of character seems to be part of a very, very, very malign web of characters who played a very active role in subverting western democracies. Will you please state your name and address? Sure, it's Adam Robert Waldman. Next time on the final episode of Who Trolled Amber, we investigate Adam Waldman. He's represented a number of very interesting and in my view controversial people. I anger a real life troll.

Alexi, yeah, Alexi, I call him Alexi. Alexi! Now what's funny is like I looked at his name and the first thing I thought was Alexi Mo yeah, Alex, I called him Alexi. Alexi! No, what's funny is, like, I looked at his name and the first thing I thought was Alexi Moistress. And we tried to get some answers. Oh, hi Mr. Wolman, this is Alexi Moistress from Tortoise Media. We contacted Johnny Depp while making this podcast, but he didn't respond. Thank you for listening to Who Trolled Amber.

Who Trolled Amber is written and reported by me, Alexi Mostros, and by Xavier Greenwood. The producer is Xavier Greenwood. Additional reporting by Katie Reilly. Sound design is by Carla Patella. The narrative editor is Gary Marshall. The editor is David Taylor. Search for Tortoise and hear more from our award-winning newsroom wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge the entire series by subscribing to Tortoise Plus or the Tortoise app. Tortoise Are you sure you parked over here? Do you see it anywhere? I think it's back this way.

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