Both of their legal teams utilized bots to drive online discussions[1][2]

Neither of these sources support this claim as none of them include any discussion on Amber Heard('s legal team) using bots?

this has been happening since the dawn of information-communication systems basically. because ever since, people have had the ability to listen in, copy, learn from etc. - so there's always been incentive to spread disinformation for some parties.

brand defence, nation-state influence operations.

There are many different flavors of the same thing, trying to mislead competitors or enemies. Or to dupe consumers ofc... Since the tech is more and more available, now also 12 year olds can run insanely large influence campaigns, to boost their streaming profiles or other somewhat benign things, but obviously modelled after what larger players have been doing forever.

The first transatlantic commercial transatlantic phoneline (TAT-1) was immediately tapped on both sides by UK/US... before that it went over radio, which was simply intercepted.

Because of that nature of the coms system being easily listened in on, just like they do/did with the lil mirror-beam-splitters at GCHQ etc.., its been natural effect to then provide disinformation over those channels. perhaps even use those channels exclusively for disinformation, and have a secure channel to do _actual_ coms.

So as you can imagine there has been many decades now of practice in why and how to share disinformation effectively to undermine other peoples work or processes.

Why are you being downvoting for sharing this relevant truth, complete with sources?