I have seen far more people get upset about what the Depp verdict means for the future of humanity than people who actually gave a shit about the trial. The give-a-shit factor on Johnny Depp is really low. What coverage we saw was undoubtedly PR-driven; it still wasn't enough to get most people to give a shit. Considering nobody followed it, it's pretty disingenuous to give a shit now just because it's been spun through your personal give-a-shit filter. You know what I keep seeing? NOW we give a shit. Exercise for the student: Which is going to be harder to influence, a defamation trial between two celebrities, or a defamation trial between a murderous cause-celeb and the press that covered his murders?
Let the record show that some members of our respective social circles are very, very divergent. Confession; My give-a-shit factor on all of it was almost exactly zero until I lost a round of Jackbox to peers' Amber Heard-targeted jokes, then give-a-shit levels were 0.01-ish (NOTE: reality ends after these parentheses), then it was "ruin hubski with it", and the real injustice is that people didn't understand the brilliance of my non-Depp-Heard humor that night. It not you, it's me, but I don't know where you're going with this. I wanna say it's harder to influence a mass media v. cause-celeb, b/c mass media financing has entered the chat, but there was plenty of mass media shit going down on both sides, especially for Rittenhouse. I'd bet the PR funding was more disparate for Depp-Heard PR. We're at the "how obviously is social media affecting the judicial branch" phase, now, I think.Exercise for the student:..
My argument is that social media influence was easy in the Johnny Depp trial because nobody really gives a shit about the Johnny Depp trial. You pull that shit with Kyle Rittenhaus and the Twitter Army is gonna leap out of the woodwork. I think we're witnessing a mild effect in an inconsequential forum.
Again, some transparency would be nice. I have a web crawler that, with some effort/time (which I don't really have), I could point at Twitter and ping topics or accounts of interest, the trending shit, whatever, and I could probably glean quite a bit, but it'd be nothing compared to what Twitter-internal analytics would reveal.