A detailed report of rolling stone published this week, reveals that the social media campaign surrounding the premiere of the Zack Snyder’s Justice League could have been powered by fake accounts. For weeks, executives and visible heads of the production company were attacked on social networks by a massive rejection campaign. As the text mentions, a detailed investigation by WarnerMedia delves into the tactic of using bots to implement the campaign around the film.
Especially once the possibility of its premiere on HBO Max became a reality. The information also suggests that the massive campaign against executives and visible heads of Warner was not an organic phenomenon. Much less a reaction based on fan discontent. In reality, it was a well-planned strategy by the director to achieve a public effect.
According to journalist Tatiana Siegel, it all started in the spring of 2020, when the director had the first direct confrontations with the production company. By then, the director’s cut of the League of Justice had been advertised as part of the HBO Max content. And that generated some immediate conflicts. The first of these was due to the petition to remove the names of Geoff Johns and Jon Berg from the film’s credits. Zack Snyder sent his agent on the phone almost daily to check if the request had been fulfilled.
In the end, the insistence of both the director and his wife Deborah Snyder, also a producer of the film, reached a critical point. always according to rolling stoneZack Snyder ended up confronting an executive about the disputed issue. In the middle of the discussion, the director threatened that, if the names of the producers were not erased from the list of credits, “he would destroy them on social networks”. A phrase that now seems to take on a new meaning after months of harassment of WarnerMedia executives.
Social networks as a battlefield
User movements in favor of Zack Snyder have been frequent since the failed premiere of the League of Justice in 2017. With Joss Whedon credited as director, Snyder’s work was mixed with a style entirely different from his own. The result was an irregular, incomplete and confused work that disappointed the public and scandalized the critics. For the following year, the hashtags #ReleaseTheSnyderCut required showing Zack Snyder’s version. As revealed by the filmmaker himself in several interviews, there were hours of recorded footage that was not included in the final cut. Which completely changed the result.
In the end, the campaign was successful and, amid the uncertainty of the pandemic, the so-called Snyder Cut It was released on the HBO Max platform. It was a curious strategy, which touched two points at the same time. On the one hand, please the insistent campaign in fan networks. And on the other, to support the recent arrival of HBO Max. The movie was a hit and turned Zack Snyder into something of a pop culture hero.. Especially since his version of the failed one League of Justicewas much more complete and substantially coherent than the one released in theaters.
But while Zack Snyder was basking in his public success, there was an avalanche of attacks against Warner Bros. and its executives. Social networks were filled with threats to executives — some so serious as to be considered dangerous — and calls for boycotts. Groups of thousands of alleged fans on social networks harassed, insulted and pointed to the visible heads of WarnerMedia.
The attacks also included Adam Wingard, director Godzilla vs. konga film that was released less than two weeks after the Snyder Cut. The angry fans considered that it was a maneuver by Warner to steal the attention of the superhero film.
It was a massive phenomenon, so direct and punctual, that a good number of experts questioned whether it was completely spontaneous. And, in fact, the report of rolling stone He points out that the company commissioned two different reports to study what happened. The result was to verify that at least 13% of the accounts that participated in the media harassment were false. The companies Q5id Y graphika it was much bigger than the usual trends about internet movements agglutinated under one cause.
As if that were not enough, the firm Alethea Group checked some irregular points in the domain forsnydercut.com. The website takes credit for the success of the hashtags #ReleaseTheSnyderCut in May 2018. rolling stone discovered that it is owned by a defunct advertising agency. One that, in addition, insists on the possibility of selling traffic “in a cheap and simple way”.
The Snyder Cut at the center of all problems
The report of rolling stone it shows, on the other hand, that the magazine carried out its own investigations. Even using the same cybersecurity companies like Q5id. The objective? Analyze in depth the impact of the campaigns that benefited Zack Snyder and the so-called SnyderVerse. In the end, they found indications that they did not “there is no doubt” that there was the intentional use of bots (fake accounts) involved.
In fact, the article quotes Q5id CIO Becky Wanta, who explains in detail how a group of fake accounts works. In particular, in trends of such a category. “There are certain patterns that the bots we saw here emit. They arrive almost at the same time in large numbers. And many times the origin of thousands or even millions of messages can be traced back to a single source or two. Sometimes they can be traced back to unusual servers in remote countries. And its content will be precisely similar,” Wanta explained to rolling stone.
In fact, the use of public pressure continued after the launch of the Snyder Cut on March 18, 2021. According to information from TheWrap, the use of bots could have influenced the results of the Oscar Award granted by the public this year. But, even more dangerous, is the fact that it is a campaign that includes selective attacks. According to Vanity Fair Y voxtoxic fandom behavior “has much more in common with abusive right-wing campaigns like Gamergate than it does with most of mainstream geek culture.”
For Becky Wanta, the danger is clear: “You can run the court of public opinion,” says Wanta for rolling stone. A trend that could be a hidden threat to the web security of hundreds of public figures in the world.
