The Internet has been aflame this week over a study suggesting Russian trolls and bots had been deployed as part of a campaign to bring down one of the biggest movies in the Star Wars franchise.
“Russian trolls stoked ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ fan outrage, study finds,” blared MarketWatch on Monday night, referring to the 2017 action hit that some commentators criticized for a liberal and feminist agenda.
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But it turns out Russian bots generated no notable activity around “Last Jedi,” the box office was certainly not affected by any online activity and even the negative tweets were just as likely to come from real fans who happened to dislike the movie artistically as from alt-right figures looking to target its alleged politics.
How do we know this? The author of the study says so.