- A USC study found that half of all tweets criticizing Star Wars: The Last Jedi were either non-human bots or Russian trolls using the debate to propagate extreme far-right political messages. What do you think?
- “I can’t believe bots would turn on Star Wars after all the representation they’ve gotten from R2D2, C3PO, and BB-8.”
- “That’s kind of overkill if all they wanted to do is get Star Wars nerds to argue.”
- “I don’t need a Russian bot to convince me I hate women.”
So is everything bots these days? I know that this is the Onion but this seems to be the general consensus. Why does everything have to be sociopolitical? Are there still stories being created for the sake of a fun story without everyone needing to turn it into a soapbox? Am I allowed dislike things like bombs being dropped in space or Leia suddenly becoming a master force user after being blasted out into space or does that mean I'm a Russian bot and I hate women? For what it's worth, in my opinion they're all very silly movies that you have to switch your brain off in order to completely enjoy, including the original trilogy. They're all kinda overrated. Does having this opinion make me the worst kind of bigoted Russian troll bot? This 'Russian troll' scare is really starting to make it seem like people were born yesterday. Guess what, we always had 'fake news'. Back in the day we used to call it 'propaganda' and it's something that every organisation and government uses, on it's own people as well as everyone else. Your government does it too. Guess what, we always had this kind of 'troll'. Back in the day they were called 'shills' and it's something that every government and organisation uses to spread their propaganda or message or adverts. And here's one more 'guess what', and this is a big one. Not everyone that doesn't share your opinion is a troll or a bot trying to spread some shitty sociopolitical message and not all art is a soapbox. Sometimes a story is just a story and people just call it good or bad based on their personal feelings of it.
This is based on a recent study by someone at the University of Southern California. I haven't looked into the study, so I can't really say how credible it is. Since the Russian "troll factory" is a hot topic these days, parts of the media ran with it, possibly blowing it out of proportion. I'm with you on being annoyed at the vocabulary used to describe these propaganda campaigns. "Fake news" was originally solely used when talking about the web sites masquerading as news organisations to make a quick buck on advertisement. Then parts of the media started using the term also when reporting on the Russian propaganda campaigns, some even muddling the two together. Then those who prefer the version of reality presented by the propaganda machine started using the term to describe real news. And now the term is basically meaningless. But the bots is a real issue. An army of bots is an effective way to steer the conversation on social media, especially on Twitter, which has proven especially vulnerable to such campaigns. So why would Russian shills waste their time on something as insignificant as the Star Wars fandom? My guess is there simply wasn't much important going on during that time, but people on the payroll needed something to tweet about. A big controversial film release is a good chance to cause some minor havoc during political downtime.