A harassment campaign on Twitter targeted Amber Heard supporters, and included mocking the death of one woman's child, researchers find

• Hundreds of Twitter accounts spread attacks against Amber Heard and her supporters, a new report found.
• The researchers found 627 Twitter accounts dedicated to tweeting negative things about Heard.

Hundreds of pro-Johnny Depp Twitter accounts spread attacks against Amber Heard and targeted her supporters during and after this year's highly publicized defamation trial, according to a report published Monday from research organization Bot Sentinel.

In one instance, a pro-Depp troll created a hoax account that used the photo of and pretended to be the deceased child of a "prominent academic" who had tweeted support for Heard, the report said.

"Trolls escalated their harassment and doxxed the academic's family members," according to the report. "This criminal activity led to the target fearing for the safety of her family and herself."

The account was used to "taunt and torment" the academic, the report said. The academic was not named in the report "to protect her identity and her family's safety."

The academic, whose identity is known by Insider, said "the harassment and abuse perpetrated by Depp supporters was like nothing I have ever seen."

"The level of abusive conduct that the report described did not surprise me," she told Insider. "What does surprise me is that leading tech companies such as Twitter and YouTube are not doing enough to rein in the online harassment of women even though they must be fully aware it is occurring on their platforms.

Bot Sentinel, a non-partisan and community-funded research organization founded in 2018 to fight targeted harassment and disinformation online, analyzed 14,292 tweets with anti-Heard hashtags such as "AmberHeardIsALiar" for the report.

Researchers found 627 Twitter accounts dedicated to tweeting negative things about Amber Heard and her supporters during and after the trial. Almost a quarter of the accounts that tweeted negative hashtags related to Amber Heard were created in the past seven months, the report found.

"The way Twitter is in general, a few accounts can cause a lot of trouble," Christopher Bouzy, the founder of Bot Sentinel, told Insider on Monday. "But with this, we're talking over 600 accounts all just focused predominantly on her and her supporters and the case."

Researchers stated in the report that Twitter "didn't do enough to mitigate the platform manipulation" and to stop abuse and targeted harassment of Heard and her supporters. A Twitter spokesperson told Insider on Monday the company was reviewing the report and would review the accounts mentioned and "take action according to the Twitter Rules."

"Twitter essentially left the women to fend for themselves with little to no support from the platform," the report said.

Many accounts were dedicated to spamming anti-Heard hashtags

The pro-Depp accounts did not act entirely in unison, Bouzy said, though many of the accounts appeared to be connected and most utilized similar methods to spread anti-Heard messaging. As Insider previously reported, misinformation about Heard and the trial was prolific as it occurred earlier this year, racking up millions of views and likes across platforms like Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube.

"There are multiple groups here, but they're all using similar tactics, and it's clear a lot of this stuff is coordinated," Bouzy said, adding that the same group of accounts appeared to be constantly targeting Heard supporters.

More than 3,200 accounts tweeted the same four anti-Heard hashtags with 19% of those accounts "dedicated to spamming them," according to the report. The report found many accounts replied to unrelated tweets with the hashtags, while others tweeted encouragement to spread the hashtags to get them to trend on the platform.

Messages were amplified through the use of "copypasta," the practice where the same content is copied and pasted by multiple accounts, the report said.

Bouzy said researchers determined which accounts were "spamming" by using Twitter's own rules related to platform manipulation and spam.

Bot Sentinel in 2020 was paid to conduct a report for Heard's legal team. That work was not connected to the report released Monday, Bouzy told Insider. The report released Monday was conducted beginning in June of this year because there was interest in the topic, he said.

As Insider previously reported, a jury in Virginia at the beginning of June found Heard, who was married to Depp from 2015 to 2017, defamed the actor in a 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post in which she said she was the victim of domestic abuse. Heard never named Depp in the op-ed.

The jury awarded Depp $10 million in compensatory damages and another $5 million in punitive damages, though the punitive damages were lowered to $350,000 in accordance with the law in Virginia.