about President Trump and his administration or retweet supporters of the president or the president’s own tweets,” Bay wrote in his study. “A majority of the accounts in this category would tweet frequently and positively about party-based politics, e.g. It’s of those 209 tweets, however, that 50.9 percent were either politically motivated, trolls or bots.īay told Polygon that although he expected to find trolls in his research, the most fascinating discovery was how many of the negative comments came from people who generally didn’t care about Star Wars. His research led to an intriguing discovery, finding that half of all negative tweets directed at Johnson were from “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.”Ģ09 of the 967 tweets Bay analyzed were negative - meaning about one in five fans were directly sending complaints or insults to Johnson. 13, 2017, and July 20, 2018, wherein he collected “1,273 tweets tweeted directly at the director’s Twitter handle.” Bay then condensed those tweets down further, deciding to weed out a “series of several tweets expressing the same sentiment from the same account,” creating the “foundation for the account analysis to follow, since each user was now represented by one tweet.” Bay’s report, “Weaponizing the haters: The Last Jedi and the strategic politicization of pop culture through social media manipulation,” focused on the period between Dec. Morten Bay, a research fellow at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism’s Center for the Digital Future, recently published a study analyzing the wave of attacks directed at Johnson on Twitter following the release of his entry into the Star Wars canon.

But a new study claims that up to 50 percent of The Last Jedi backlash may have come from bots, troll accounts and politically motivated activists. This brand of online rage campaign has become a familiar and predictable reaction to progressive entertainment. Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson received a lot of backlash on Twitter for his entry in the Star Wars franchise.

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