But there’s a deeper problem with saying political operatives weaponized The Last Jedi
— a framing that Bay’s paper and most reports on it have accepted. At a
time when pop culture is incredibly intertwined with politics, it
suggests that talking about politics in pop culture is
artificial and manipulative. And the paper’s most interesting
implication may not be that there was a strategic attempt to politicize
the Last Jedi debate, but that the internet makes it incredibly
hard to gauge how deep political divisions run — because anybody on
Twitter can sound important, even when they’re not.
[…]
The paper doesn’t indicate an explicitly coordinated campaign to create
an artificial political dispute. It suggests that a lot of real,
individual humans decided to express genuinely held political views
about a movie that they didn’t care much about. But the structure of the
study also establishes these two categories as part of a single
phenomenon of “deliberate, organized political influence measures,” or
as the paper title puts it, “social media manipulation.” That’s a much
more sweeping suggestion.
Political discourse on social media is seen by many as polarized,
vitriolic and permeated by falsehoods and misinformation. Political
operators have exploited all of these aspects of the discourse for
strategic purposes, most famously during the Russian social media
influence campaign during the 2016 Presidential election in the United
States and current, similar efforts targeting the U.S. elections in 2018
and 2020. The results of the social media study presented in this paper
presents evidence that political influence through manipulation of
social media discussions is no longer exclusive to political debate but
can now also be found in pop culture. Specifically, this study examines a
collection of tweets relating to a much-publicized fan dispute over the
Star Wars franchise film Episode VIII: The Last Jedi. The study finds
evidence of deliberate, organized political influence measures disguised
as fan arguments. 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 results of the study show that among those who address
The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson directly on Twitter to express their
dissatisfaction, more than half are bots, trolls/sock puppets or
political activists using the debate to propagate political messages
supporting extreme right-wing causes and the discrimination of gender,
race or sexuality. A number of these users appear to be Russian trolls.
The paper concludes that while it is only a minority of Twitter accounts
that tweet negatively about The Last Jedi, organized attempts at
politicizing the pop culture discourse on social media for strategic
purposes are significant enough that users should be made aware of these
measures, so they can act accordingly.
So, it looks to me like a lot of the noise about The Last Jedi was created by bad actors, but that their motivations were probably varied, and some/most of it probably wasn’t coordinated, but was more in the nature of opportunistic dogpiling. The data is open to interpretation.
Hearseeno 