Half of Star Wars: The latest Jedi reaction was made up of robots and Russian trolls

When he arrived in theaters last year, director-writer Rian Johnson Star wars: The last Jedi was greeted with an immediate reaction from a specific corner of his audience. As VoxTodd VanDerWerff noted in December that the review seemed to come from many different angles: some thought the film was too progressive, too funny, that he was not interested in the elaborate universe of fan theories since enlarged. the release of the original trilogy, or that the characters' journeys were not exactly to their liking.

None of these lines of attack is new or really surprising, especially for a 40-year-old darling series that many believe defines their experience of science fiction and fan culture in general. What is new in this series of critics is how it has become political (and politically useful) – at least for those who want to use popular culture to influence voters.

A new article by Morten Bay, researcher at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, reveals that the polarized speech of fans surrounding The last Jedi was also the site of an attempt to campaign for Russian political influence. Bay reviewed a corpus of tweeted messages to Rian Johnson between December 13, 2017 and July 20, 2018 – a total of 967 tweets – analyzed their sentiment, segmented the results by account, and analyzed Twitter accounts. "Overall," Bay concludes, "50.9% of those who tweeted negatively were probably motivated by political or even human reasons. "(Bay also found that most fans are not so dissatisfied The last Jedi that they will boycott any new Star wars movies.)

As Bay notes in his summary, the negative tweets were probably sent to get media coverage of the fan conflict, which, in his words, was meant to[e] a story of discord and dysfunction widespread in American society. "It is the conviction of voters to persuade it, it is an objective of both the right and the right. and The Russian Federation. "Russian trolls are using Star Wars criticism as an instrument of information warfare to push for political change, while right-wing advocates are using what they do to promote an order of the day. conservative day. / social justice assault, "wrote Bay.

Nowadays, it becomes more and more difficult to say whether fans who angrily tweet their grievances are even more real, let alone political motivations. You can not always judge a movie by its rotten score, and you may not be able to judge a fan by its tweets.