The news of Zack Snyder’s brainchild for the DC Extended Universe ending comes on the heels of the disclosure about the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut movement being partly driven by bots. The outlet that brought these facts to light also reported that Snyder contracted digital firms to champion his “grassroots” online support for 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. So the story goes.
It is pretty clear that someone somewhere is trying to manipulate things. Particularly when it comes to actresses and female pop culture characters. The online bot push to bashing female leads in Star Wars, Marvel, and DC got crazy and it fed into a trend that got negative reactions and ratings to just about everything with female leads. You could see it happening when films like Captain Marvel and Birds of Prey were getting review bombed with comments that clearly indicated that people didn’t actually see the films.
The exact people who have been running these bot-fueled astroturfing campaigns should be fairly easy to track down if any companies invested in doing it. I mean, Rolling Stone hired their own firm and it quickly deduced one of the main domains spurring the Snyder Cut shit was owned by a now-defunct Ad agency that offered bots. The trail is there. What is obvious is that these campaigns all come from the same social/political angle. They all revel in misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc. and try to amplify those sentiments depending on who the target is.
The one thing that makes this particular case somewhat extraordinary is that Snyder was pretty directly involved in it, but we didn’t need this report to uncover that. You could see that in real time, just in the social media platforms and personalities he chose to engage with. He knew which fanbase he was courting. Snyder didn’t even attempt his prefunctory, he was chasing the worst corners of the internet. Once the film was released the most he did was say, I’m not associated with Gamers & Geeks (even though he constantly responded to and upvoted their contributors) who lead the Snydercut revolution, WHILE ON A G&G STREAM.
And if we are also talking about the theatrical version of Justice League. I don’t understand the people using this weird, circular logic. Snyder made a movie that WB was unhappy with. Then WB gave Joss Whedon money to harass the cast & crew and make the movie worse. So WB ends up spending another $73 million to restore the VFX for Snyder’s version of the movie and film a tacked-on Knightmare sequence that no one but the hardcore-est of hardcore edgelord Snyder fans liked and somehow this proves that Whedon’s version was worse because…he didn’t get as much money and runtime for reshoots? Why do people think that getting a C+ cut of a movie that was originally a C- movie worth spending an additional $78 million while also resulting in people losing jobs, other projects to be cancelled, and families getting death threats? This was WB’s own incompetence.
At the end of the day, I think it’s probably not great to have a bunch of angry, terminally online chuds running around pulling online effery without consequence. And by “consequence,” I mean that any of these lil’ tough guys who tried their little nerd terror campaigns should be hauled in and prosecuted with anything that’ll stick. The further away we get from Gamergate, the more apparent it is that it was the start of, you know, everything.