Oh, thank God. Finally, a believable reason why there seemed to be so much hate for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. As a fan of the film, I knew for a fact that there couldn’t be anyone out there who hated it. Yes, in case you’re wondering, I am being sarcastic, but apparently, a new study is placing at least some of the blame for the hate on Russian trolls.

According to the paper written by Doctor Morten Bay from the University of Southern California, they found “evidence of deliberate, organized political influence measures disguised as fan arguments.” The speculated goal here was to add to the perceived dysfunction inherent in American society. Pretty much, “the country is already divided, and for some reason, let’s also make them argue about Star Wars.”

Here is what else Bay had to say in his abstract:

“Persuading voters of this narrative remains a strategic goal for the U.S. alt-right movement, as well as the Russian Federation. The results of the study show that among those who address The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson directly on Twitter to express their dissatisfaction, more than half are bots, trolls/sock puppets or political activists using the debate to propagate political messages supporting extreme right-wing causes and the discrimination of gender, race or sexuality. A number of these users appear to be Russian trolls. The paper concludes that while it is only a minority of Twitter accounts that tweet negatively about The Last Jedi, organized attempts at politicizing the pop culture discourse on social media for strategic purposes are significant enough that users should be made aware of these measures, so they can act accordingly.”

Okay, pretty interesting. So how was this study conducted? Its scope was fairly limited. Bay collected 1,273 tweets that were tweeted to Rian Johnson from between December 13, 2017 and July 20, 2018. From there, the tweets were scraped using Data Miner software.

He then deleted tweets sent by the same user, as the goal was to gather sentiment behind each user, not just all tweets. This reduced the number of tweets to 967. From there, he categorized tweets as negative, positive, or neutral, which was apparently easy due to the lack of nuance in the tweets.

RELATED – Why Kathleen Kennedy Sticking With Star Wars Is Good News

They then looked into the accounts to assess whether or not the users were simply dissatisfied with the movie or were somehow motivated by another agenda. From there, he also assessed how many users were trolls or even Russian Trolls. The user utilized a list of criteria for identifying Russian trolls (a list developed from studies on the 2016 U.S. election) and identified the number of potential fabricated Russian accounts (you can check out the piece yourself for more specifics as to how it was calculated.

The result? More than 50% of negative users were motivated by a political agenda or potentially not even human. Of the total number, only 21.9% of fans expressed negative sentiment towards the film.

Again, his sample size consisted of 967 users. Of those, only 206 accounts were deemed negative, and of those, 16 appeared to be Russian trolls. Those Russian trolls have a tendency to disparage the director, retweet messages from Donald Trump, right-wing U.S. politics, and other similar subjects. Honestly, I’m really simplifying the hell out of this, so I highly recommend checking out the study for yourself.

It’s a small sample size, but it’s hard not to wonder how indicative it is of the larger picture.

What do you think of all this? Let us know down below!

Don’t forget to share this post on your Facebook wall and with your Twitter followers! Just hit the buttons on the top of this page.

SOURCE: Research Gate (via THR)