Toxic fans have made Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s trial inescapable

You aren’t imagining things. You aren’t imagining things. The internet is submerged in memes and supercuts. Livestreams and fancams.

This trial is part of an ongoing legal dispute between the actors. Amber Heard filed for divorce in May 2016. In 2018, she wrote an op-ed to the Washington Post about her experience as a survivor of sexual assault. Depp wasn’t named in the piece, but in 2019 he filed a suit against Heard for defamation. She filed a countersuit a year later. The trial continues in Fairfax County, Virginia.

Major social networks encourage bad behavior in order to boost their engagement numbers. This has created a toxic fandom bomb. During Depp v. HeardOnline fan communities have spread a vicious cycle of outrage, defensiveness, and ugliness that has infected the internet like a virus. It is now taking over the forms of those who do well on the platforms. It has become a new Twitch meta, the Washington Post reported, flooding the platform’s “Just Chatting” page with livestreams and reaction streams. And on TikTok, the #justiceforjohnnydepp hashtag on the app has almost 7 billion views, per a recent report by Rolling Stone. You can find pro-Depp makeup tutorials on fancams. These include clips from his testimony that have cute filters, as well as supercuts to make Amber appear unstable.

Fandom isn’t new — you can trace it all the way back to reading clubs for Sherlock Holmes. The internet has brought a new level to fandom. The internet has made it more similar to online gangs and cults. They protect and police each other instead of allowing real moderation via large social media platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter. This is because these platforms spend years training and rewarding their users to act as swarms. Users share content that has been linked to favorite franchises or actors, and engage in a war for control.

Social media reactions to Depp v. Heard is the most recent example — though it feels particularly inescapable compared to online fan movements that have come before. This doesn’t feel like a niche corner of the web yelling out into the void. It is ubiquitous. It is now called a proxy culture warfare by Emmi Conley (a researcher who studies online propaganda), where fans for Depp and Heard use the actors to represent the movement’s archetypes.

“People are following it like a sport. Obsessing about it. You can make GIFs or memes about it. You’ll notice the conversation isn’t about male victims of domestic violence or resources for survivors of abuse,” she said.

How did we get to this point? Conley said that the Tumblr ban on porn was a turning point in internet fandom. After a mass exodus of about 150 million users, following the site’s controversial ban on NSFW content in 2018, Twitter became the new home base for fandom content. And the site’s very different incentives around going viral and being engaged drastically changed the way fandoms interacted with each other.

“They are no longer mostly contained within their circles. Fandoms can be made to see themselves, which is one of the greatest things. They want to see themselves on the trending page,” Conley said, pointing to how K-pop fandoms try to dominate the site. “Like everything else on sites like Twitter, fandom on big social media platforms is less about mutual enjoyment or subject matter (like it used to be on blogs or forums) but about volume,” she said.

Depp’s fans were on Twitter at the time that Depp brought up Heard in his defamation suit. At the time, fans of the DC cinematic universe and Zack Snyder’s Justice LeagueThey organized the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut campaign via Reddit, Twitter and Facebook. Snyder fans were convinced that a different version of the movie existed — rather than the one reedited and reshot by Joss Whedon — and they were mobilizing across the web to pressure Warner Bros. to release it. Snyder Cut was eventually released, and Snyder fans were vindicated. However they gained the reputation of being entitled and toxic. They began to petition for Heard’s removal from DC films like “The Shining” after Depp had filed the suit. Justice LeagueAnd Aquaman and Lost KingdomDepp sided with them, believing that messy divorce proceedings or a defamation suit could prevent their viewing of these films.

However, the trial was able to find an audience elsewhere on the internet. “I think TikTok tipped it over the edge into national consciousness,” Jessica Lucas, a digital culture researcher and journalist based in the U.K., told Polygon.

Lucas said that as the trial began in April, TikTok users became obsessed with it because of the site’s preexisting love of true crime. “There are plenty of examples of viral ‘investigations’ done by TikTok sleuths, and in this case TikTok gets to be judge and jury, which again is why it’s, unfortunately, proving to be so popular,” she said, pointing to TikTok’s similar obsession with the Gabby Petito disappearance, “Couch Guy,” and the attempted doxxing of West Elm Caleb.

TikTok, perhaps more aggressively than any other social platform on the web, emphasizes content that can fit within subcultures and fandoms — to the point where the company’s blog in 2021 declared that subcultures were “the new demographics.” Also, every feature is shareable or remixable, meaning it’s not just videos that can trend, but also the audio within that video, the movements recorded, the fashion worn, and the hashtags with which it’s tagged.

“Users are able to take something quite serious and remix it, chop it up to fit their narrative, add music and effects — i.e., a zoom, closing in on a shot — to completely change the tone of what’s going on in the courtroom,” Lucas said. “It’s everyone compiling their own cases, arguments, and evidence and presenting it in a way that fits their ultimate goal.”

Livestreams of this trial are becoming hugely popular via YouTube and Twitch. LawandCrimeNetwork, a channel that simulcasts the trial across both YouTube and Twitch, is also available. And as the Washington Post pointed out, major streamers like Hasan Piker and Imane “Pokimane” Anys are now streaming it to their millions of viewers. It’s a simple act to take a trial. Depp v. HeardIt was jarring to feed it via Twitch’s aesthetics. For instance, the streamer and pro gamer Félix Lengyel, better known as xQc, made headlines last week for putting a “cry counter” on screen to count how many times Heard teared up during her testimony.

Image: YouTube/xQcOW

According to Casey Holmes, a streamer from Austin, Texas, who goes by the name LucidFoxx, it’s not surprising that the trial is popular on the platform. “These are all parasocialities,” Holmes told Polygon. “And I think because people know who Amber Heard is and know who Johnny Depp is, it kind of gives them this, I don’t know, maybe artificial idea that they’re tuned in to what this trial is, who these people are.”

Reddit was also affected by the flurry of TikTok and livestreams related to the trial towards the end April. Subreddits such as the wholesome r/MadeMeSmile started to fill up quickly with bizarre attempts at reframe the trial into an inspiring story for Depp.

“There’s some kind of disconnect,” Amanda Brennan, the former head of editorial for Tumblr and current trends analyst for XX Artists, told Polygon. “It doesn’t feel real to people.”

Brennan said she was disturbed by what she’s seen online over the last few months. Brennan said Depp is being treated online as if he were one of her characters, and that’s not true. “There’s no throughline of where Johnny Depp ends and his characters begin,” she said. “There’s so many of these memes that I’ve seen that have been people dressed in Jack Sparrow cosplay, which — it blows my mind.”

Brennan saw trial memes also as an endpoint to a particular type of online parasociality. “You’ve got your super-internet people who live in this kind of parasocial world of, ‘Oh, this is my fandom. Protecting my son is what makes me happy. I must protect this person that I care so much about.’ But it’s not necessarily the person they care about,” she said.

Social platforms have heavily incentivized this blurring of celebrity with the characters they play and with the fandom and community built around them, as the flurry of activity from fans boost streamers’ and content creators’ engagement metrics. “It’s distressing to see,” Brennan said. “Identifying with this person who possibly did very terrible things to someone else, and had very terrible things done to them.”

“It’s performative fandom, the whole thing,” Brennan said.