Skepticism

Catching Empathy, and How Bots Made You Hate Amber Heard

Transcript:

The other day I was sent a link to a new podcast investigating the roll that bots played in the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trial (thanks to, um, @MansonInfoWars for the tip). If you missed the latest Trial of the Century, it was an extremely contentious civil lawsuit in which Johnny Depp was suing Amber Heard for defamation because she wrote an article in which she described herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” Back when it was concluding in 2022, I made an angry little video calling out pseudoscientists who claimed to be able to tell Amber Heard was lying about being abused because of her body language and whatnot.

In that video I mentioned that there was a pretty obvious artificial campaign against Heard led by conservatives: Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire spent $35,000 to $47,000 just on Facebook ads decrying “The Attempted Character Assassination of Johnny Depp,” linking to articles that outright lied about a previous court case Depp lost in which a judge found that he had likely assaulted Heard at least 12 times. Experts pointed out that the Daily Wire made a savvy business decision to tap into their potential readers’ existing misogyny, converting them into easy clicks using Heard as a popular witch to burn.

So it didn’t exactly surprise me to read about this new podcast from Tortoise, titled “Who Trolled Amber.” The podcast’s host asked two disinformation experts to analyze about a million Tweets from 2020 and 2021 that specifically attacked Heard, and the experts found that more than half of them came from inauthentic accounts – bots and trolls. They found a coordinated campaign of bots posting identical messages, from trying to get brands to stop working with Heard to calling her a disgusting liar while praising Depp. One bot network was the apparently famous “Saudi Ministry of Flies,” a group of bots that usually focus on praising Saudi Arabia’s authoritarian leadership. Tortoise notes “Saudi money is financing two of Depp’s latest movies: the period drama Jeanne du Barry and a biopic of Modigliani called Modi. More significantly, Depp has made several trips to Saudi since 2022. According to Bradley, he has even become personal friends with (Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman).“

Wow, talk about friends in low places!

It’s hard to say how much these ad campaigns and bots helped Depp, but it’s worth noting that the jury in his case were not sequestered. They were allowed to be on their phones for the entire trial, enabling them to see what appeared to be a real groundswell of support for Depp and against Heard.

I happened to read about this on the same day that I found this new study in my favorite journal PNAS: The social transmission of empathy relies on observational reinforcement learning. The researchers asked a group of about 50 Asian women (a homogeneous group to limit the role of culture and societal expectations) to watch a video in which a person receives a painful stimulation on their hand. They were then asked to rate how they felt while watching it, from 0  (did not feel anything) to 100 (feeling extremely bad). They then watched as a confederate (who they assumed was just another subject) responded with either a lot of empathy or no empathy. They then were shown another video and asked how they felt.

The women who were paired with an empathetic person were more likely to increase their empathy in their second viewing. Those paired with an unempathetic person decreased their empathy.

You may be wondering how the researchers know that the subjects weren’t just faking their empathetic response in order to just not stand out as much, to better match what the other person was doing. It would still be an interesting result if that were what was happening, but in this case the researchers got further evidence that observing empathy actually changes a person’s response in their brain. Yep, they stuck the subjects in an fMRI! My normal caution about fMRI should always be kept in mind (they are easy to screw up) but yeah, it’s super cool that they could actually see the “empathetic” subjects’ brains changing the connectivity of the anterior insula, which is associated with empathy processing.

What’s all this got to do with bots attacking Amber Heard? Well, I found it really disgusting how many people felt so confident in publicly dunking on a woman who had pretty good evidence that her ex-partner had physically abused her. And it’s my hope that had social media not been positively infested with hatred for Heard, fewer people would have felt so comfortable standing up and calling her a liar. Those bots and conservative ad placements artificially generated an atmosphere completely lacking in empathy, giving the average person on the internet the confidence to join in. Those bot and ad campaigns actively made people worse.

And they aren’t going away. Whoever bought those bots probably felt like they got their money’s worth, and so it’s going to keep happening again and again, especially with the US election happening this November. It’s not just disinformation that these networks spread–it’’s also sheer hatred. So try to keep it in mind that while it’s important to combat the misinformation that spreads so easily on social media, it may be equally important to spread empathy. As the lead author said in a press release for the study, “The good news from our studies is that we have the means to shape empathetic ability in adults through appropriate measures in both directions. It is possible to learn positive empathy from others. However, for empathy to thrive long-term, it requires an atmosphere of mutual respect. One can respect someone without having empathy for that person, but it is challenging to develop empathy if the other person is not respected as a human or if disrespect is accepted in society.”
It’s worth noting who we see being dehumanized in our society, and asking why that is. For instance, there are a hell of a lot of folks, including my very own US president, who clearly do not think that Palestinians are fully human. I guess I really needed to see this study on empathy right now, when it seems like so many people just refuse to see the Israeli genocide for what it is. I do think there’s probably no convincing many people at this point, but maybe we actually can make a little difference by demonstrating empathy and hoping against hope that it will trigger an equal and opposite empathetic reaction in others.

Rebecca Watson

Rebecca is a writer, speaker, YouTube personality, and unrepentant science nerd. In addition to founding and continuing to run Skepchick, she hosts Quiz-o-Tron, a monthly science-themed quiz show and podcast that pits comedians against nerds. There is an asteroid named in her honor. Twitter @rebeccawatson Mastodon mstdn.social/@rebeccawatson Instagram @actuallyrebeccawatson TikTok @actuallyrebeccawatson YouTube @rebeccawatson BlueSky @rebeccawatson.bsky.social

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