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So it's only fitting that in 2017, with no elections to speak of, those same trolls took their now-well-oiled, battle-hardened operation and pointed it squarely at another rabid fanbase: Star Wars.Īccording to Morten Bay, a researcher from the University of Southern California, the seemingly overwhelming backlash against The Last Jedi was in part fueled by "deliberate, organized political influence measures disguised as fan arguments," undertaken with the objective of "propagating a narrative of widespread discord and dysfunction in society." That seems like a leap, but consider that following the movie's release, criticisms of TLJ were hijacked by a variety of grifters and hucksters as evidence that feminism, multiculturalism, homosexuality, and thinking-that-the-Nazis-were-bad-ism have ruined Star Wars, and by extension society.īay looked at every user who fired a negative tweet at the movie's director, Rian Johnson, between December 2017 and July 2018, and placed them - based on their larger Twitter usage - into three categories "real fantagonists" (normal fans who disliked the movie), "troll/sockpuppets/bots," and "political agenda" (those who were tweeting about the film as part of a larger attack on the movie's supposed politics). Throughout 2016, a sophisticated Russian troll army pumped out salvos of fake news, angry tweets, and dopey-ass memes in the hope that disagreements between liberals and conservatives would spill over and bring about the end of Western democracy.