Learning Digital Anti-Feminism: Depp v. Heard, YouTube and How Platforms Shape What Counts as “Evidence”

• In Event: 41059 - Gender, Representation, and Identity in Digital Media

Abstract

The court case Depp v. Heard took place in the spring of 2022, and in legacy media both online and offline it dominated headlines during that period. This paper analyzes a very different reception and afterlife of the trial: on the video platforms YouTube and TikTok, Depp v. Heard remained current and remained a part of debate far longer and became a site for interaction and antifeminist radicalization. Using upload counts, viewership numbers and comments over time, we show that YouTube users lived with Depp v. Heard for a much longer time period than people consuming news about the trial elsewhere. We show that the stakes on YouTube especially were very different: using topic modeling and collocation analysis on a corpus of over a million YouTube comments, we show how YouTube commenters learned (and taught each other) how to agree on salient data points from the hundreds of hours of trial footage (which were entirely different from the data points usually rehearsed outside of these platforms). They taught each other how to extrapolate from these data points and make more abstract claims about “women” and #MeToo. And they taught each other specific techniques of disbelief. Those techniques of disbelief drew on the affordances of the social media age, but they likewise demonstrate striking continuities with very old modes of objectification and epistemic destabilization of subaltern groups.

Authors

• Adrian Daub, Stanford University

• Bethany J. Nichols, Stanford University

• Alison Dahl Crossley, Stanford University