I saw some of Depp’s “testimony” on TV, quite by accident. Does the really think he’s Captain Jack Sparrow for reals?
When my daughter was a few years old, a friend of mine had a baby named Amber. My daughter would say ‘baby hamburger’ instead of ‘baby Amber’.
Nah, that was “What if Keith Richards went full transvestite zombie?”
Why not? If he has to pick a role to live out it is better than Willy Wonka or Edward Scissorhands.
Stranger
I would rather guess that in portraying Captain Jack Sparrow, he is just being himself.
I agree. And that brings me to this:
I have absolutely no interest in this story, in and of itself. My level of detachment goes beyond disinterest and fully rises to total uninterest. I have never clicked on a news article about it, never watched an online video on it, never written a single word on the topic until this post. The very little I know about the story has been absorbed osmotically because of all the bellowing around me. The only reason I read this thread at all was because it was the best place to share what I’m about to describe. The point is, there is absolutely nothing in my online history that would suggest I’d want to read or watch anything about it.
And yet, the story is absolutely inescapable; I find myself scrolling past endless links on the topic. It’s not just the headlines on a site like CNN or BBC News, which are still largely managed and placed in an old-fashioned manual way by content curators. It also includes the news aggregators like Yahoo and Google, which are supposed to dynamically adjust their presentation based on their perception of your interests, using your click history as a guide. And it also includes YouTube, which is even more aggressive in trying to grab your eyeballs by offering you more of what you’ve previously watched. Everyone has the experience of watching a sports-blooper video, or a makeup tutorial, and suddenly the recommendations panel is full of that exact thing.
I’m seeing the Depp/Heard material everywhere, despite my never once having clicked into a single piece of content on the subject. Literally half the videos in my YouTube sidebar are clips of testimony from the trial. I get dozens of stories on the news sites. Yahoo News even sent me a recommendation email dedicated to it, with links to articles and videos.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, because it’s the same thing I was thinking until yesterday: It’s just The Algorithm. Depp/Heard is the big cultural story right now, sucking in millions of eyeballs, so of course the automated systems would converge on that center of gravity. The channel monitors can see in real time that a majority percentage of the audience is measurably attracted by the event, so the more that gets shoveled into the trough, the more traffic will be drawn. This is irritating, but it’s also plausible, so I was resigned to suffering the deluge in silence.
But then, yesterday, I wanted to find an old movie clip to show to my kids. I opened my YouTube app and tapped into the search bar, and I was shocked and horrified to see, right at the top of the suggested search list, above my previous searches: johnny depp amber heard trial clips. Something I’d never looked for, something I never would look for, something that has no basis for me as a suggested search.
This goes beyond The Algorithm. This doesn’t happen unless it’s being pushed somehow.
How do I know this, you ask? Why am I so confident? Because I am able to peer back through the mists of memory into the deep prehistoric era of a few weeks ago, when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock during the Oscars. Now, I know that happened so far back that most of the youngsters reading this won’t remember, but for several straight days, the story was everywhere, the same way the Depp/Heard story is now. Top-of-the-page headlines, endless tweets, hundreds of videos. Every opinion writer immediately shared their “take.” Would-be viral comedians produced wacky remixes of the slap. It was all anyone could talk about for days.
Just like now, I didn’t click into that avalanche of content either. Despite everyone’s attempts to make that story Mean Something somehow, it was deeply uninteresting to me (snotty multimillionaire has personal beef with another snotty multimillionaire, film at eleven), so I ignored it. Just like now, there was a wave of headlines, and my YouTube recs were full of variations on the story.
But unlike now — my lack of interest resulted in an adjustment by the suggestion engines. I right-clicked on a couple of YouTube thumbs and said “not interested,” and they went away. And I certainly never once saw anything being forcibly inserted in any search bar.
I’ve right-clicked to dismiss a dozen videos in the Depp/Heard flood, and yet they persist. And the search suggestion is still there.
None of this is definitive, of course. It’s still within the boundaries of believability that this is just The Algorithm running amok. But it feels materially different from the very similar Smith/Rock example just a few weeks ago, and my suspicions are aroused.
Which brings us back to Riemann’s question about why there would be a conspiracy to favor Depp and tear down Heard. And there, I think, the answer is obvious. It has nothing to do with them as individuals (apart from Depp’s longstanding cult of romantic admirers), and it has everything to do with the opportunity to establish a high-profile example of a Crazy Woman Who Made Up Her Abuse.
Seriously, think about it. In the wake of #metoo and a new interest in accountability and the absolutely justified mantra of “Believe Her,” there have to be literally thousands of powerful scumbags, and many more of their misogynistic acolytes, who would gleefully leap at the chance to promote a story about a palpably dishonest <ferengi> “Fee-male” </ferengi> who hides her villainous agenda behind a fabricated tale of victimhood, in order to create cover for their own chauvinist malfeasance. “Oh, you can’t believe my employee when she says I harassed her,” they will say, “don’t you remember Amber Heard?” And suddenly we’re back in the bad old world of he-said-she-said with the scales of justice tipped heavily against the perceived untrustworthiness of women.
It doesn’t have to be a top-down conspiracy, either; this could easily emerge from the bottom-dwelling filth of the dark web. I absolutely believe the troglodytes of 4chan and various other malignant internet dungeons would be willing to pool a few dollars to feed into the content-elevation machinery in order to keep the sexist version of this story at our collective top-of-mind, with the sole objective of “reminding women of their place.” I absolutely believe this is plausible.
And with that said, I will now go back to trying to fend off the onslaught of unwanted news stories and videos, applying the usual mechanisms of deprioritization, to see whether it continues to make no difference.
Coming back to add a postscript, because it occurs to me I could be misunderstood: Nothing here should be read as suggesting I am taking sides or have an opinion about the reliability or veracity of either party in this nasty little event. As described, I am not following this story and I have neither information nor desire to learn it. What I do have is an arm’s-length sense of the way the stories are clearly slanted, because it’s impossible not to perceive it, and a strong suspicion about why that is getting so much traction. If my hypothesis is correct, the truth, however messy, is irrelevant, and what matters is the narrative being promoted by external activists. That’s it.
I like your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Seriously, I have just enough paranoia to think you might be on to something. I just checked youtube. Now I am anonymous - I don’t have an account. But it still knows who I am via cookies. Aside from the usual recommendations of dash cam footage and star trek videos, there are two recommendations for videos about the trial. Like you, outside of this thread I’ve never paid it one tiny bit of attention.
What a very interesting post. I had a very different experience though. I have the commercial free youtube (not youtube TV) and was logged in. I had one Heard/Depp video in the first five suggestions and had to scroll down quite a bit to get another one. I entered “not interested” or something like that one the second one and now there aren’t any in my feed. It’s nearly all live music clips with the occasional vintage tv show or engineering video.
I just went to youtube on the computer that gets very little non-work related use, not logged in to youtube.
There were only two references to the trial, both under trending, one that is apparently live right now, and one that is a recap of yesterday.
After scrolling down quite a ways, I found a third and fourth.
My thought is that these are celebrities, and celebrities draw significant attention. No real need for a conspiracy to explain it.
Sure, but this is a rather different question. What I was originally responding to was the notion that there could be a conspiracy to misrepresent the facts of this case by presenting a biased narrative. That I don’t think is plausible. I think “taking down” the pretentious Depp would be more newsworthy (or at least click-generating) than what we are seeing.
What you’re talking about is not really a conspiracy, so much as noting that misogynists and MRA types are delighting in what they are seeing, and pushing for maximum publicity. That’s likely true, but it does not imply that the facts of the case are anything different from what we’ve seen. And I think most of the publicity is explained simply by the fact that it’s entertaining clickbait.
Seriously, who hasn’t?
My kids were young (2 & 5) and were told daddy was tired and sleeping, but hey.
As someone who, like Cervaise, is not following the trial, but keeps seeing it everywhere anyway, I don’t think that I’m actually seeing all the facts, though. I’m seeing tons and tons of videos of Depp being charming and vulnerable on the witness stand, and lots of reactions pictures of Heard looking mean or “bitchy,” but almost nothing that puts Depp in a seriously bad light, other than having some substance abuse problems. It could be that the trial is really like that, but it seems way more likely to me that there are people heavily pushing clips and memes that support Depp, and not Heard. Not in a “conspiracy” sense, just in the sense that there are a lot of misogynist trolls out there who spend a lot of their time pushing content that suits their agenda, to a degree that I don’t think exists on the other “side” of the issue.
I checked my usual Youtube account and had zero Depp/Heard news, just the usual assortment of tech videos and YT’s weird insistence that I really want to watch The Lock-Picking Lawyer.
I tried a different browser, not logged in, and there were three Depp/Heard videos in the top two rows but they were all live-streams of the trial from different news sources. I had to go down a good way to find videos with commentary or recaps. This version of Youtube was REALLY interested in me watching LØLØ music videos though – by the time I found a Depp/Heard recap video, I had scrolled past five different music videos by this person.
I don’t think that’s borne out by the massive publicity surrounding well known male public figures who were taken down for their crimes or moral failings. If the material were there to take the pretentious Depp down, do you really think we wouldn’t be seeing it?
This is one of the reasons that I don’t think that most trials should be televised in the first place, much less a trainwreck of one like this one.
There may be some misogyny involved in pushing a narrative, but the majority is just our (collective human) penchant for indulging in gossip. Their dirty laundry is being aired, and many people enjoy that sort of thing.
Yeah, that’s weird. I’ve never watched any of those videos, nor anything about locks or locksmiths or lockpicking, but I usually have one or two of those videos in the first page or so. (I do occasionally watch videos with lawyers, but that seems a stretch for the algorithm.)
Assuming it existed, I’d expect it would be relatively easy to find it if you were invested in the trial and actively following it through at least quasi-legitimate news sources. I’m not that person, though. I’m not invested, and not actively following it. I’m talking about what I see when I scroll “New” posts in Reddit, or what pops up on Facebook while I’m browsing. I can absolutely believe that I’m not getting served the full picture of the trial just by going off what’s pushed by an ad serving algorithm.
Amber who?
You haven’t Heard?
Shiiit!
I find this somewhat reminiscent of stories where the narrative (and sometimes the reality) is “wokeness gone mad”, typically some college professor getting censured or fired or something like that. Stories that are similarly pushed with glee by those with an agenda. Once a story is out there I don’t think it’s a good response to hope that the facts of the specific case have been misrepresented just because the people who like the narrative of the story (and who would seek to make a false generalization) are deplorable. I think any reluctance to acknowledge the facts of the specific case, a “nothing to see here” response, just tends to support the false generalization narrative. Better, I think, to engage with the facts of the specific case on its merits, note that it’s a straw man to suggest that anyone holds the position that accusers never lie or that an accused does not deserve due process, and place it in the true context - that virtually all “MeToo” cases (whether serious crimes or lesser misconduct) have been supported by multiple independent allegations.