The Worst People on the Internet are ‘Body Language Experts’

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Miscellaneous | January 11, 2024 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Miscellaneous | January 11, 2024 |

I’m not good at making eye contact with people. There’s no deep-seated explanation for why. I just don’t do great staring into someone else’s gaze when I’m talking. I wave my hands around a lot during conversations. I don’t have much of a poker face. My overbite means that my resting face is a tad gormless. All of this makes me a liar, apparently. These are all the traits of someone who cannot be trusted, who is trying to deceive you and keep horrid things concealed. Well, so the body language experts tell me.

The junk science of body language experts has long been debunked. There is no ambiguity over this, as many actual scientists and psychologists have noted for years. Vincent Denault, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at McGill University, told Wired, ‘When specific gestures are associated with specific meanings, and when this is implicitly or explicitly presented as scientific, then it begins to fall under the umbrella of pseudoscience.’ We know this and evidence to support this case is plentiful and readily accessible. Still, we must deal with the barrage of online wannabe Psych stars who have decided to make their coin through the deliberate spreading of misinformation.

When the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial happened, the internet became a desolate hellfire of victim-blaming and misogyny for profit. Even by the total lack of standards of social media and junk tabloids, a new nadir was reached during what we could most charitably label a total farce. We’re going to spend years, maybe decades, trying to unpack the damage caused by this public display of hatred and legal abuse, and even after Heard has received her long-awaited re-evaluation from these ghouls, the cycle of exploitation won’t stop. A lot of people made a lot of money from their hijacking of this shambolic affair. People made Etsy merchandise of Heard’s pain, turned her rape testimony into memes, and marketed themselves as true crime experts to milk YouTube ad revenue from the harassment. During this trial, my own YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok recommendations were overrun by an obscenely common trend: body language experts. Video after video of smarmy pseudoscience from ‘self-taught’ losers informing me that the tilt of Heard’s chin or the way she cried all signaled her as a serial liar and world-class manipulator.

The Wired piece interviews a couple of these YouTubers who are pulling in thousands of dollars a month through untrained analyses of celebrities. One man, Bruce Durham, offers ‘proof’ of Meghan Markle lying during her Oprah interview, interspersing clips of her acting fairly normally with scenes from Disney’s Pinocchio. Another, Logan Portenier, spent a lot of time claiming that Heard’s deposition was ‘cringe.’ He claims he didn’t expect the video to go viral and stresses he’s not an expert on any of this, but it doesn’t stop him from raking in the dollars that his 1600+ Patreon supporters offer.

To nobody’s surprise, these same so-called experts also have lots of videos dedicated to Brie Larson, a woman whose only crime was to be in a superhero movie and acknowledge that feminism is a thing she agrees with. Megan Thee Stallion was a common culprit to tear apart too, the same with Meghan Markle. Indeed, we end up seeing a hell of a lot of women being torn to shreds for mere eyerolls or hand waves. There is this astonishing insistence that every minor tic is directly linked to an explicit emotional response, one that is controlled and deliberate in the message a person wants to convey (which makes it all the more ridiculous that we would ever need ‘experts’ in body language to decipher them.) It’s not internet-exclusive, of course. You can find body language readers in tabloids and on tatty docudramas asserting that their specific brand of mysticism has the legal weight of written confessions.

Watching these videos is its own special kind of hell. It’s all unsurprisingly conspiratorial in tone, inelegantly edited to reveal only what the creator wants you to see. Nothing is ever a sign of someone’s innocence or mere existence on this hell-planet. Everything is bad. You cried? Too emotional and you’re probably faking it. You’re stony-faced? Clearly that’s a sign of your sociopathic tendencies and you’re in need of a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder (a common armchair medical claim flung at Heard by this crowd.) Not making eye contact for a microsecond is a sign you’re lying. To be uncomfortable in any capacity is the ultimate proof of your guilt. It’s the same cycle over and over again, always applied to the same group of people who are being judged by the court of opinion on matters big and small.

What does it mean when we hear these people say that someone ‘looks’ guilty? It reminds me of the women who waited in line to see Ted Bundy on trial, fawning over him to reporters that ‘he just doesn’t look like’ he could kill or assault potentially dozens of women. What made him seem so innocent? Was it his whiteness? His extremely exaggerated handsomeness? It doesn’t take much for credible accusations to be twisted into a narrative that favours the perpetrator. For the people who watched the Depp-Heard trial having already been poisoned by a well-funded smear campaign against her that included heavily edited audio files and proven lies, guilt is merely whatever feeds their confirmation bias. In this case, misogyny and biphobia helped. Often, it’s racism playing its ugly card, as centuries of the legal system can attest to. There’s a very fine line between body language readings and straight-up racial profiling.

There are many things we used to accept as irrefutable evidence that we know now to be, at the very least, compromised. Blood spatter analysis is total bullsh*t, a trade made up by a guy with no forensic qualifications that has caused a ton of damage to the criminal justice system. Arson science was previously seen as sound but was later revealed to be totally devoid of actual science. Polygraph tests are easy to screw up. We used to pathologize that queer people were predisposed to sexually aberrant behaviour towards children. Eugenics and phrenology were admissible in court for a long time. The science of justice is forever changing, as it needs to, but a broken system continues to cling to outdated and dangerous methods because truth often matters far less to those in charge than a tidy conclusion with obvious heroes and villains.

Not being sad is not a crime. Acting weird, however that is defined, is not proof of any kind of wrongdoing. This limiting view of humanity traps all of us, whether it’s women being ‘too emotional’ or evilly stoic, Black men’s silence being labelled as ‘threatening,’ trans women ‘not passing’, or neurodivergent people simply being themselves. To posit that all nonverbal behaviour is proof of the verbal is the stuff of fantasy, not justice. Alas, YouTube isn’t in the business of truth; it’s in business for itself, for whatever will bring in the highest amount of clicks, and we know nothing makes money more effectively and ruthlessly right now than good old-fashioned hatred. Lies spread faster than reality, and now every TikToker or YouTuber thinks watching a few episodes of Law and Order gives them the means to punish others for the entertainment of hate mobs. So, the next time one of these videos turns up in your recommendations, delete it immediately.