Zack Snyder was getting agitated. Over the course of several weeks in the spring of 2020, the director repeatedly demanded that the names of two producers, Geoff Johns and Jon Berg, be removed from his next cut of Justice League, the DC superhero film that had closed in 2017. Its high-powered CAA agent began calling Warner Bros. daily. to check why the couple had not been removed from the credit list. Simultaneously, Snyder’s wife, Deborah, another producer of the film, began pressuring an executive in the studio’s stories department with the same directive. (Snyder admits that the couple “asked the studio” to intervene after “a personal plea” to Johns and Berg was ignored.) By June 26, 2020, Snyder had had enough. According to various sources familiar with the matter, Snyder confronted an executive in the studio’s post-production department and issued a threat: “Geoff and Jon are dragging their feet to get their names out of my court. Now, the I will destroy social media. “
A toxic movement on social media had already been brewing around the director at least since 2018, full of online screams for Warner Bros. #ReleaseTheSnyderCut of Justice League two years later. As Snyder’s demands increased backstage, including more money to finish his four-hour cut of HBO Max film director and access to intellectual property – so did a flood of attacks directed at Warner Bros .: calls for a boycott, demands to fire some executives, even death threats against them. Fans chased anyone or anything who considered a danger to the so-called SnyderVerse, including directors like Adam Wingard (who Godzilla vs. Kong released on HBO Max 13 days later Tall Snyder and stole part of his piece) and movies like Wonder Woman 1984 (of which Johns was a writer). The attack included cyberbullying, so the security division of Warner Bros. (A Warner Bros. Discovery spokesman declined to comment, “since this issue predates the current leadership and the new company.”)
And as the chaos was built, many experts questioned how organic the SnyderVerse legion really was. According to two reports commissioned by WarnerMedia and recently obtained by Rolling rock, at least 13 percent of the accounts that participated in the conversation about the Snyder Cut were considered fake, well above the three or five percent that cyber experts say they usually see on any trending topic. (In public presentations, Twitter has estimated that the percentage of daily active accounts on its platform that are “fake or spam” is less than five percent). Thus, while Snyder had numerous true fans of flesh and blood, those true tobacconists were amplified by a disproportionate number of false accounts.
Two companies contacted by Rolling rock tracing the authenticity of the social media campaigns, Q5id and Graphika, also detected non-authentic activities from the SnyderVerse community. And another company, Alethea Group, found that the domain forsnydercut.com, which claims to have gone viral with the hashtag #ReleaseTheSnyderCut in May 2018, and became the centerpiece of efforts to bring Snyder back to the head of the DC universe. – At least at one point you signed up for a person who also ran a defunct advertising agency that promoted their ability to bring “cheap and instant avatar traffic to your website.”
Rolling rock spoke to more than 20 people involved with both the original Justice League and Snyder’s cut, most of whom believe the director was working to manipulate the ongoing campaign. Snyder claims that, “if anyone” was pulling the strings of social media fervor, it was Warner Bros. “that I was trying to take advantage of my fan base to bolster the subscribers of their new streaming service.” But a source maintains: “Zack was like a Lex Luthor wreaking havoc.”
For a time, rival studios and digital marketing executives were intrigued by the mobilization of SnyderVerse fans, wondering how they could also make better use of the power of social media. But soon many came to question what appeared to be a suspicious activity: hashtags like #ReleaseTheSnyderCut saturated social media from the end of 2019, accumulating hundreds of thousands of tweets a day to pressure Warner Bros. for him to release the director’s version of the film. And when the studio finally released Synder’s new cut in March 2021, #RestoreTheSnyderVerse, an incipient fan hashtag calling for Warner Bros. give the green light to more Snyder DC movies, amassed more than a million tweets in one day.
“Just look at the drop: [That hashtag was] trend to a million tweets a day for when they wanted to launch the Snyder Cut. And it dropped to 40,000 in a few days, “says a digital marketing executive, who claims the phenomenon became the Hollywood conversation.” You don’t see a drop like this in an organic way. ” executive, seems to be a classic example of “arming a movement.”
In mid-January 2021, three months before the Snyder Cut of Justice League It was finally posted, an Instagram account with the handling @daniras_ilust posted a horrifying image depicting the beheaded heads of Johns, the president of DC Films, Walter Hamada, and the former president of Warner Bros. Pictures Group, Toby Emmerich. The image quickly circulated among the fandom, and SnyderVerse devotees even tagged the social media accounts of some of the trio’s children. It was alarming publications like these that led WarnerMedia, concerned about the safety of its employees, to take the unusual step of silently commissioning a series of reports from a third-party cybersecurity company to analyze trolling.
The reports had acquired a mythical status within Warner Bros. Some doubted that they even existed. But a small group of the parent company did have access to it. The main report, dated April 2021 and titled “Presence on SnyderCut Social Media,” offers a chilling insight into the powerful movement.
“After researching online conversations about the Snyder Cut of the Justice League‘, specifically the hashtags’ ReleaseTheSnyderCut’ and ‘RestoreTheSnyderVerse’ on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, [the analysts] detected an increase in negative activity created by both real and fake authors, “the report concludes.” An identified community was made up of real and fake authors who spread negative content about WarnerMedia for not restoring ‘SnyderVerse.’ In addition, three main leaders were identified within the scanned authors on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram: one leader on each platform. These leaders received maximum participation and have many followers, which gives them the ability to influence public opinion. ”In addition, the report said, many authors were spreading“ harmful content ”about the then president of Warner Bros. Ann Sarnoff (who had called fan trolling “reprehensible” in an interview with Variety), “with most authors labeled her a liar for the film’s non-Snyder Cut claim and asked Warner Media to fire her. These authors also began using the tag ‘BoycottWarnerBros’. ”Another internal report found an active subcommunity attacking Johns.
Rolling rock asked three other social media cybersecurity and intelligence companies, including Q5id, to analyze SnyderVerse-related data from the months leading up to the launch of Snyder Cut in 2021, looking for signs of unauthentic activity on social media. (This activity could take a variety of forms, including attempts to manipulate speech involving human-operated networks of non-authentic accounts; or the use of software to automate account publishing and participation activity, often called “bots”) . Q5id information director and technology director Becky Wanta says her company’s analysis indicates that “there is no doubt that there were robots.”
Wanta explains, “There are certain patterns that emit the bots we saw here. They arrive almost simultaneously in large numbers. And often the source of thousands or even millions of messages can be located in one or two sources. “Sometimes they can be located on unusual servers in remote countries. And their content will be exactly similar.”
This means that a fandom amplified by fake accounts helped overthrow a large studio, at a final cost to Warner Bros. of more than $ 100 million, to re-release a film that had already been bombed years before.
The campaign did not end with the launch of the Snyder Cut on March 18, 2021. The Wrapper reported in May that the robots could have considered Snyder winning two favorite fan awards at this year’s Oscars. And according to social media firm Graphika, the pattern of a frenzy of mostly organic social media fans augmented by a small number of non-authentic accounts is still occurring. “We see clear signs of coordinated online activity since May and June this year, when several communities pushed hashtags that promoted Zack Snyder and mocked Warner Bros.,” says Avneesh Chandra, a data analyst at Graphika. Rolling rock. As examples, Graphika points to accounts that appeared to exist only for bombarding Twitter and responses from WarnerMedia social media accounts with constant hashtags in favor of Snyder.
Chandra downplays the effectiveness of this non-genuine activity, noting that “many of these accounts are spam and have failed to eliminate noise,” but says it is clear that there is some manipulation. “Most of this activity was made up of real, passionate users who took the lead from influential figures in the pro-Snyder community,” says Chandra. “We regularly see these kinds of adversarial social media campaigns driven by real people coordinating online. When you kick the wasp nest of a large, committed and confrontational fan community, this can be so, if not more, scary. how to deal with a …