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Do not underestimate the power of the dark side.
A new academic study found that online Russian trolls and robots probably fueled fans' dissent after the release of last year's "Star Wars: The Last Jedi". While the movie, from Walt Disney Co.
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Lucasfilm, which has grossed more than $ 620 million in the domestic market and more than $ 1.3 billion worldwide, has been the subject of a fierce online reaction by ferocious and ferocious fans. many so-called "alt-right" opponents. Fascist message and female heroes.
But most of the film's critics involved "deliberate and organized measures of political influence, disguised as supporters' arguments," wrote Morten Bay, a researcher at the University of Southern California. "The likely goal of these measures is to increase media coverage of the ghost conflict, thus adding to the spread of a discourse on widespread discord and dysfunction in American society. Persuading the voters of this story remains a strategic goal for the American "right" movement, as well as for the Russian Federation.
While studying tweets sent to "Last Jedi" director, Rian Johnson, over a period of seven months, Bay found that more than half of the negative tweets were "probably motivated by political or even human considerations."
"A number of these users seem to be Russian trolls," he wrote in his study, entitled "Weaponizing The Haters: The Last Jedi" and the strategic politicization of pop culture through the manipulation of social media. "
Overall, he found that only 21.9% of "The Last Jedi" tweets analyzed were negative at first.
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was one of the main social media battlegrounds for Russian misinformation in the 2016 presidential election, and there is no indication that Russian-backed tweets have stopped trying to sow dissent in the United States and elsewhere.
The study "shows that spaces of pop culture on social media are now also political battlefields, vulnerable to the same polarization, the same manipulation and the same misinformation organized in the vitriol that we meet in the usual places of online political discourse, "writes Bay.
In a series of tweetsJohnson, who said he was subject to "a virulent strain of online harassment," said [of the study] described is my online experience. "
Last December, an opposing rights group claimed credit for lowering the "Last Jedi" fan rating in Rotten Tomatoes. The same group said they also tried to sabotage Rotten Tomatoes' score for "Black Panther," another Disney film, earlier this year. This campaign did not end up harming box-office cinema, which earned more than $ 700 million in the domestic market and $ 1.3 billion worldwide.
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