November 6, 2023

The story so far: Executives, performers, and writers in movie, TV, video game, and comic book companies are under siege.  Efforts to include diverse, marginalized, minority characters and social justice story elements in pop culture have been met with mass campaigns of mean words and down-votes deployed by organized groups and bot armies.

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Self-identified victims describe their adversaries as members of a basement-dwelling underclass of ill-tempered, unemployed, loveless losers.  Like their preferred, outdated heroes, these enemy combatants are mostly white, male, straight Americans.

One subgroup suspected of harboring ominous fans is the geeks.  They’re mostly male, white, straight, and American.  Many geeks make and watch videos discussing movies, shows, games, and pop culture merchandise.  Interestingly, many of the geeks hosting video channels are so gracious that they willingly grant, without evidence, that among geek fans, there are a few bigots.  Their videos regularly denounce targeted harassment, and they tell viewers not tp contact or post comments on websites of entertainment industry figures whose products or activities they discuss.

As early as the announcement of filming for Star Trek: The Next Generation, geeks’ trepidation about changing pop culture in conformity to new worldviews has been dismissed as unjustifiably rejecting positive innovation.  The assumption that mindless bigots are part of geek fandom is a predictable development.

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The 2019 release of the high-budget, low-anticipation Captain Marvel movie coincided with review website Rotten Tomatoes “suddenly” discovering that viewers’ ability to review movies before the official release, a longstanding feature, turned out to be a “bug” that needed immediate action.  Also discovered were a number of negative reviews posted that were “nearly” trolling.  R.T. snapped into action, disabling (temporarily) some website functionality and removing 54,000 viewer reviews of the 58,000 posted during the first five hours that Captain Marvel was showing.  R.T. described these changes as a service to fans, who might otherwise miss an opportunity to spend money and time on not enjoying a film.

Flash forward to November 3, 2023.  Former MMA fighter and former Disney Star Wars star Gina Carano posted comments about Disney CEO Bob Iger’s 2016 decision against purchasing Twitter because users included too many bots.  Carano noted that Twitter ownership affords much control over the direction of public discourse.  But, a corporation could achieve the same control of the conversation, at far less cost, by deploying a bot army.  She also speculates that using a bot army to generate apparently widespread disapproval of an individual would be useful to justify canceling that person.  After controversy arose over her own indifference to pronouns, questioning masking, and a short-lived post warning against mindlessly following authoritarians, Disney cited disapproval posted by fans to justifying firing Gina.

On November 1, 2023, Rolling Stone published “HBO Bosses Used ‘Secret‘ Fake Accounts to Troll TV Critics.” Current HBO CEO and chairman Casey Bloys and senior V.P. Kathleen McCaffrey ordered staff to create fake social media accounts for posting snarky responses to unwanted criticism and pro-HBO comments not traceable to HBO.

Bloys’s apology for harassing critics was discussed in a November 2, 2023 video, “Hollywood’s Lie Exposed.”  Geeks and Gamers’ commenter Jeremy doubts Bloys’s sincerity.  He also mentioned widespread and longstanding suspicions of a phenomenon regularly arising during online pop culture controversies.  Appearing from nowhere, social media accounts with a handful of followers and uniformly favorable opinions of all progressive alterations to entertainment franchises were immediately boosted by massive numbers of re-postings and up-votes.

Negative fan responses to movies like Disney Star Wars’ flops were used to stoke suspicions that disappointed fans were connected to more than just organized hate messaging campaigns.  In 2016, they were alleged to be connected to the same, now-discredited imaginary Russian trolls long blamed for Donald Trump’s unexpected election victory.

With admissions of mass campaigns and bot activity launched from the side proclaiming themselves victims of large-scale, organized campaigns, we have reason for further skepticism.