On the surface, they seem like genuine fans of his Johnny Depp. Their social media accounts are filled with photos of the Hollywood star and they tweet up to 20 times a day, praising the actor and blasting his ex-wife, Amber Heard.

“Amber is a thug and a liar”claims one of them. “She’s a traitor”. Another writes: “Amber is the most disgusting woman I have ever seen: Johnny is innocent. . he’s a legend.”

But these accounts do not belong, as the “Daily Mail” writes, to “genuine” fans. Evidence suggests they are controlled by “paid trolls” with links to the Saudi Arabian government.

In 2022, Johnny Depp, 60, won a defamation case against Heard, 37, after a US grand jury found she had fabricated allegations of domestic abuse against him. Depp’s win was an impressive comeback for the actor.

Two years earlier, a UK court had come to the opposite conclusion, with a judge ruling that Depp had abused Heard on 12 occasions.

Before the US trial, thousands of pro-Depp accounts were created on social media. Heard’s team suspected that someone had used bots, but were never able to prove it.

Were they right after all? This is the conclusion the podcast seems to reach “Who Trolled Amber?”. “We found evidence that, in the run-up to the trial, over 50% of all tweets criticizing Amber Heard were ‘inauthentic.’

This means that they either came from “bots”, i.e. automated accounts that can send thousands of messages a day, or from “paid trolls”. We looked at more than a million tweets, the first large-scale analysis of its kind. The results suggest that bots and trolls played a significant role in turning public opinion – certainly online – against the actress.”according to the clues.

Saudi Arabia has a long history of using bots and trolls to promote its leaders and disparage its opponents. The regime even had a special “headquarters” in Riyadh, where workers were paid $3,000 a month!