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For months before and after the publication of Star Wars: The Last Jedi– a critically acclaimed titan for film and box office – what appeared to be a small number of fans said they hated the film's turn on the franchise formula. They were crazy about everything, intrigues and the supposed disdain of director Rian Johnson for his focus on inclusion, and they did their best to explain everything about them and how angry they were. Well, just as you would have thought, it turned out that one of the major causes of this violent reaction was perhaps an unfair manipulation of social media sites such as Twitter to promote political propaganda.
Morten Bay, a professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, analyzed a selection of 967 tweets (each pulled from a separate account) addressed to director, Rian Johnson, during the same period. December 13, 2017 and July 20, 2018. Using sentiment analysis to sort the tweets as positive, negative or neutral and then analyzing the accounts themselves, Bay found that "50.9% of those who tweeted negative way [were] probably politically motivated or not even human. "
Bay wrote: "The results of the study show that among those who address the director of The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson directly on Twitter to express their dissatisfaction, more than half are bots, trolls / sock puppets or political activists who use the debate to spread political messages. support the causes of the far right and discrimination based on sex, race or sexuality. A number of these users seem to be Russian trolls.
However, it was also found that a very small minority of the tweets actually expressed negative feelings towards Johnson or to The last Jedi: Only 21.9% of tweets (206) were critical, including bots. This number has been reduced to only 10.5% when bot accounts are excluded. The Verge pointed out that only 16 of the "puppet / bot troll / sock accounts" seemed to be related to Russia, as defined by "comprehensive lists of Russian troll detection criteria" identified from the analysis of the alleged Russian operation to interfere in the 2016 conflict. elections:
Forty-four of these accounts were identified as bots, puppets or trolls, and 61 of these 206 accounts indicated a "clear political agenda".[a]"- a definition that includes real humans who tweet heavily about politics. Of the 44 puppet / bot / sock puppet counts, 33 were identified as trolls or sock puppets. Bay has only identified 16 of the 33 suspected to be Russian trolls. Trolls and bots are actually a minority accounts tweeting negative opinions about The Last Jedi.
So, to recap, only a small minority of people tweeting against Johnson were "robots, sock puppets or trolls", although a large proportion of those who were crazy about The last Jedi were. Of these, a handful would have been linked to Russian interference operations. (Note that the study analyzed only each original account, not the number of tweets themselves, which means that a small number of accounts angry with Johnson would have could send enough tweets to appear to a layman as a horde, nor does it consider the tweet accounts. The last Jedi without scoring Johnson, which is undoubtedly a much larger number).
The small number of foreign trolls makes sense, even though the goal of the Russian Federation is to "propagate a narrative of widespread discord and dysfunction in American society," Bay writes in his study. Riling up a handful of angry people about Star wars This is not really a major geopolitical victory, and seeing the Kremlin's evil hands at the root of every online fight is an unhealthy obsession.
But this leaves with the unfortunate implication that many others, including right-wing activists, have eagerly engaged in an "organized attempt to disrupt and sow discord by using the The last Jedi controversy, "wrote Bay:
Due to the limitations of the dataset and the limited nature of this study, it is appropriate to generalize and extend this analysis to the entire Star Wars fandom with extreme caution. all dissatisfied fans are not Twitter users and all the disappointed fans are not going to tweet directly to Rian Johnson angry. The same can be said about fans who see the film in a positive way, of course, that is why this study considers a specific speech situation as a measure of the situation. It should nevertheless be noted that a majority of the negativity stems from politicized accounts that are often part of an organized attempt to disrupt and sow discord with the help of The Last Jedi Controversy.
Bay also pointed out that one of the goals of these people was probably "to increase media coverage of the Fandom conflict". Unfortunately for the enemies of hate, the vast majority of this coverage criticized the obvious racism and misogyny at the heart of the online harassment campaign, mocking their ridiculous plans to "redo" The last Jedi, or just speechless in front of things like this:
(For those who wonder, yes, this comic continues like this.)
But The last JediThe misanthropists did a lot of harm along the way: they harried relentlessly actress Kelly Marie Tran, as well as other members of the cast and film crew. On October 1, Johnson had tweeted that the journal's findings were "consistent with my online experience … It's particularly a virulent strain of online harassment".
Wired pointed out that this research had implications for fans in general, namely that fans trying to fight the toxic elements of the community might not realize that they were engaging with a bot and reported them a bot ":
Yes, people who do not like a particular movie will not like it for the same reasons, but it's getting harder and harder to have an honest discussion about movie quality, let alone of cultural impact, when some of the speakers are only there to throw the kerosene on a war of flames. And when that happens, when it is impossible to know what feelings are real and what motivates the people who share them, the speech crumbles.
In other words, it's another reminder that social media often makes it difficult to engage constructively around a problem and to go near the impossible while the other side is amplified by bad faith political actors. . But there is at least one solution, which is to refuse to play on the battlefields chosen by hate enemies and by their rules. In an essay published in The New York Times, Tran responded to online harassment on his own terms, refusing to be marginalized:
I want to live in a world where children of color do not spend all their adolescence wanting to be white. I want to live in a world where women are not subject to any control for their appearance, their actions or their existence in general. I want to live in a world where people of all races, religions, socio-economic classes, sexual orientations, gender identities and abilities are considered as they have always been: the human being.
This is the world in which I want to live. And this is the world to which I will continue to work.
The full study is available for download on ResearchGate beyond an e-mail registration wall.
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