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'Star Wars: The Last Jedi' Negative Buzz Amplified By Russian Trolls, Study Finds (hollywoodreporter.com)
bestweasel writes: The Hollywood Reporter highlights an academic paper which finds that half of the criticism aimed at director Rian Johnson over Star Wars: The Last Jedi was politically motivated. From the report: [Researcher Morten Bay's paper] titled Weaponizing The Haters: The Last Jedi and the strategic politicization of pop culture through social media manipulation, examines the online response to the movie that has come to be considered controversial amongst the larger fanbase of the franchise. Bay suggests that reputation may not be earned, and instead "finds evidence of deliberate, organized political influence measures disguised as fan arguments." He continues, "The likely objective of these measures is increasing media coverage of the fandom conflict, thereby adding to and further propagating a narrative of widespread discord and dysfunction in American society. Persuading voters of this narrative remains a strategic goal for the U.S. alt-right movement, as well as the Russian Federation."
The paper analyzes in depth the negative online reaction, which is split into three different camps: those with a political agenda, trolls and what Bay calls "real fantagonists," which he defines as genuine Star Wars fans disappointed in the movie. His findings are fascinating; "Overall, 50.9% of those tweeting negatively [about the movie] was likely politically motivated or not even human," he writes, noting that only 21.9% of tweets analyzed about the movie had been negative in the first place. "A number of these users appear to be Russian trolls," Bay writes of the negative tweets. In response to a tweet announcing the release of the paper, Last Jedi director Rian Johnson shared the tweet, adding, "Looking forward to reading it, but what the top-line describes is consistent with my experience online."
The paper analyzes in depth the negative online reaction, which is split into three different camps: those with a political agenda, trolls and what Bay calls "real fantagonists," which he defines as genuine Star Wars fans disappointed in the movie. His findings are fascinating; "Overall, 50.9% of those tweeting negatively [about the movie] was likely politically motivated or not even human," he writes, noting that only 21.9% of tweets analyzed about the movie had been negative in the first place. "A number of these users appear to be Russian trolls," Bay writes of the negative tweets. In response to a tweet announcing the release of the paper, Last Jedi director Rian Johnson shared the tweet, adding, "Looking forward to reading it, but what the top-line describes is consistent with my experience online."
Not the fact the movie was shit and just happened to piss all over one if the franchises most beloved characters, totally wasting any opportunity to use Luke Skywalker in any interesting capacity before unceremoniously killing him off.
They're trying to polarize both like and dislike for the movie and then cause both camps to draw an assumption about the political affiliation of the other camp. They're doing this with every element of pop culture that people disagree on. Like the summary says, the overarching goal is primarily to foster the public perception of increased social dysfunction from within and without.
Not interested in Disney's fanfic anymore. Made the mistake of seeing The Force Awakens. The plot was just a fan-service rehash of the original Star Wars and Rey was an annoying Mary Sue. So I just stopped giving Disney my money after that. Didn't make a YouTube video bitching about it or anything. I just stopped buying their toys and seeing their movies. Problem solved.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Is there anything we can't blame them for?
Messing with elections is one thing, but messing with Star Wars is going way too far.
Table-ized A.I.
"The paper concludes that while it is only a minority of Twitter accounts that tweet negatively about The Last Jedi..." Oh so everyone else's opinion is valid then. It was a crap movie.
"more than half are bots, trolls/sock puppets or political activists using the debate to propagate political messages supporting..."
Yeah I know, I've been flooded with posts of FeministComicNerd, GenderFluidMovieRanter, and MarySuePenisHater about how Last Jedi is the greatest movie ever and
that Asian chick is important to the story and not at all to pander to Chinese audiences.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
they're trying to sow discord in American society in order to weaken us politically. That's it. Nothing else.
And you know what? It's working. Not that we needed very much, given how Balkanized we are, but it's like a vial of blood in a shark pool...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I hated it. And yes, I 'm a russian troll that traveled back in time 15 years to get this username.
Red Letter Media: RED?! MUST BE RUSSIANS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
because that movie sucked ass.
I really never got The Last Jedi freak out, Sure, there was the admiral with blue hair who for some unexplainable reason left her crew hopeless rather than tell them where they were going. And sure, in a civilization with sentient robots for some reason she needed to piloted a suicide attack against the chasing fleet. And sure, if that attack is so devastating why aren't there weapons that do that?
In the end though, at least the movie wasn't a fucking carbon copy of one of the original trilogy movies. The second it came up they were going on a third fucking Death Star run in The Force Awakens (complete with: "another Death Star?", "No! It's bigger, see...") I have had no use for that movie. What a terrible ending.
Rogue One is still easily the best of the new movies (that scene where the rebel fleet warps in right on top of those two star destroyers!? And a hammer head corvette doing its thing in action!?) but Last Jedi really wasn't that bad. Especially relative to just fucking copying a classic.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
yeah, they present no actual evidence. This is literally the "Everyone I Disagree With Is A Russian Bot" mentality.
The Last Judi sucked ass. The box office reflected that only a little bit, because everyone had to see it for themselves. It had far fewer people seeing it multiple times, however.
The sales figures for the bluray (absolutely awful) reflect it.
The sales figures for the toys (absolutely awful) reflect it
The sales figures for Solo (absolutely awful) reflect it.
The sales figures for the Solo bluray (absolutely awful) reflect it.
If there's someone sewing discord in America it's people like Kathleen Kennedy and Rian Johnson. These shitlords actively attacked fans and customers. They continue to double down on alienating the people who give them money when it doesn't work. Oh, the movie did poorly because we didn't listen to the fans and their concerns? Time to call our fans racist, sexist, etc. Time to say "the Force is female" and literally say we don't need male fans. Time to insult people for not "getting" that the new animated show (at a 10PM time slot) is shallow, bland shit because it's for kids. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Disney doesn't understand Star Wars. They got a freebie with The Force Awakens because people wanted new Star Wars. They got a crappy ripoff of the original with major plot holes (who the fuck is making this map and why does R2 have a missing piece of it and if you have a portion of some map/tracking data why not just start searching in in the blank areas?). Adam Driver is a bad actor. Emo Darth Vader is a terrible character. Daisy Ridley is a plank of wood. Rey isn't a terrible character, but that's only because she isn't even a character. She's a foil, at best. A fucking Milhouse.
I won't see Episode IX in the theater. I'll wait for Redbox.
I notice you didn't throw specific criticism at Rogue One. I agree with you that Disney doesn't understand Star Wars, but I liked Rogue One anyway. It almost felt like Disney accidentally made a good one.
> The main thing that really bothers me about The Last Jedi, is that all the hate and trolling has managed to pretty much taint any and all actual criticism of the movie.
Hm. It's almost like that was the intention.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Because our perception of social disfunction is caused by disagreement over a movie.
And not, say, a broken healthcare system, a broken pension system, corrupt and stupid politicians, the church abusing small kids and then covering it up, the media actively, openly and much more aggressively reinforcing the split of society into camps, the economy being plundered by banks and the super-rich or everyone with a buck to make denying or opposing climate change.
Or any of the other issues of the day that nobody, least those whose fucking job it is, taking care of.
Sure, of all the real issues that divide and threaten society, a paid army of trolls picks movie reviews as their choice weapon to destabilise western society.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Your missing 3 zeros there buddy.
They said they found 30,000. Not 30. Between them they logged in 570,000 times , removed 220,000 'suspicious' applications that had generated over 2 billion tweets. (According to twitter)
So...yeah, vet your sources man.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
"I suppose our ruling class does it too"
Bing, bing, bing - we have a winner!
You kind of missed the bit where Russians are on average more into science fiction than Americans and thus proportionally would have been more put off by crap science fiction but of course if you are Russian and you hate something, express your opinion online you are a troll and of course if you are Russian and you like something, express your opinion online you are a troll and if you are Russian and you are indifferent to something and express your opinion online you are a troll.
To put it simply https://www.rbth.com/news/2015... and thus will use English language websites and they all are trolls, this is called rampant prejudice as is typical coming out of a very racist and prejudiced US, which is now also hugely sexually conflicted across multiple genders, I am going with Bunjil as my gender https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., in preparation for more SJW bullshit coming out of the US, that or other ;D.
American main stream media, please fuck off with your racism and prejudice, one thing I have noticed, it is funny in American media for white men to be raped in prison but not funny anywhere for women of any kind to be raped, why is that?!?
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
in this case, the trolls have it right.
Hear, hear!
I remember when I though Jar-jar was as bad as any SW character would ever get. Hell, I thought Disney would FIX things.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
We made it PRECISELY according to the committee-approved 'Star Wars action film' formula, how could it not be perfect?
I mean:
When the focus groups showed kids found it stultifying, we added cute little things that were optimized for cheap production according to our Vietnamese factories. They are perfectly designed by slave-labor engineers to be adorable.
When the focus groups showed Asian viewers thought it was stupid, we bolted onto the story a pudgy Asian chick, hopefully snagging the 'all body images are positive' demo as well.
We made the lead character a woman because powerful vaginas are super-trendy now.
We added gay dudes because well duh, you have to have gay people in an adventure.
We employed only faceless mediocrities, pretty much just like George Lucas did (except we did it so we could lock them into lifetime contracts of servitude).
WE EVEN MADE THE BAD GUY A WHITE MAN. How could that possibly be wrong in 2018?
We clearly hit all the IMPORTANT mechanics needed to make a perfect film; it had to be Russians that fucked this up.
-Styopa