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

polygon.com:

You aren’t imagining things. The internet is completely underwater, submerged in memes, supercuts, livestreams, fancams, and conspiracy theories about the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard defamation trial.

The trial is part of a long-running legal battle between the two actors. In May 2016 Amber Heard filed for divorce, and in 2018 she penned a Washington Post op-ed about being a sexual assault survivor. Depp wasn’t named in the piece, but in 2019 he filed a suit against Heard for defamation. A year later, she filed a countersuit, and the trial is now playing out both in a courthouse in Fairfax County, Virginia, and on livestreams on platforms like YouTube and Twitch.

The trial has set off a toxic fandom bomb, as major social platforms incentivize the worst human behavior possible to drive up their engagement metrics. And during Depp v. Heard, the defensiveness, ugliness, and outrage cycle of online fan communities has infected every corner of the web like a virus, taking the shape of the content that does well on those 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. There are pro-Depp makeup tutorials, fancams that throw cutesy filters on clips of his testimony, and supercuts meant to make Amber look unstable.

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Fandom isn’t new — you can trace it all the way back to reading clubs for Sherlock Holmes. But fandom in the internet age has a different level of intensity and coordination. Social media has morphed it into something closer to online gangs or cults, protecting and policing