Star Wars TLJ and the Truth about Russian Trolls
Star Wars and the Truth about Russian Trolls
Since 9/29/18 “Reliable Nerd News Sources” like “Epicstream”, “Kotaku”, “The Verge”, “The Hollywood Reporter” and “USA Today” have reported:
“Russian Trolls make up half the people critical of TLJ (The Last Jedi)”
While it would be a wonderful boon for Lucasfilms and Disney to be able to say that the honest-to-goodness truth of the “Fan Backlash” is because of “Russian Interference” none of these actual “Reporters” and Article Writers or so-called “Journalists” actually went out of their way to verify any facts!
Rather than actually checking the source these “News Sources” have been hailing the following from “Morton Bay” as some kind of holy truth:
“Russian trolls weaponize Star Wars criticism as an instrument of information warfare with the purpose of pushing for political change, while it is weaponized by right-wing fans to forward a conservative agenda and for some it is a pushback against what they perceive as a feminist/social justice onslaught,” Bay wrote. Further exploration into the Actual Facts and Evidence provided is nothing more than conjecture based on “The origin of the tweets”. Weaponized cognitive discord and propaganda? What was he thinking? This is a pretty huge claim with a simple glance over “topical data”.
Flash forward a few days to last night, 10/2/2018, I decided to do my own digging into the Metadata. Within 5 minutes I was able to verify that more than 3/4ths of the “Twitter handles from Russia” with negative criticism were actually VPN derived. What does that mean? Let me give you the definition:
VPN- A virtual private network (VPN) extends a private network across a public network, and enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network. Applications running across a VPN may therefore benefit from the functionality, security, and management of the private network.
This means that while Bay would LOVE to blame Russia for the “Star Wars StR8 H8” he’s actually incorrect (either uninformed, blissfully omitting actual research data, a liar, some form of weaponized Asperger syndrome sped, or multiple of the forementioned). Turns out that the people making fun of said property are actually just trolling people who don’t know how to run a “Script Kiddy” level IP address check through the preliminary data provided. To top it off we went to IRC with our OWN VPN with our supposed masked location somewhere in Uganda and asked a few “Hackers” who were part of the larger Star Wars Chat Communities and Fan forums. We got a few quotes from them to put your fears at ease (Names have been changed to protect the journalistic integrity and sources):
“I’ve got 87 twitter accounts attached to a unique IP each all designated in Russia and former USSR geographical locations which are their own nations now. I live in Florida.” -Dave
” ROFL LOL bro I have 22 different online identities all with ips out of russia and all of them bang-on tlj what a retarded s***show.” -Mike
“That F***in moron Bay goes to a college for journalism and communication, refuses to get in touch with the actual community, praises twitter handles locations as the word of God and thinks he’s some kind of all-knowing-all-seeing untouchable student journalist because every news source is hungry for tying Russian Collaboration to anything they can to push their political agenda while ignoring the glaring fact that we’re here and have not heard a peep from this hack. He’s a joke and so are these supposed news sources. F***ing trash!” -Clockwork Lazarus
After the foray into actual hardcore fan-chats, facebook groups, and a trip into a digital-hacker-land we even took a little look on the “Dark Web” with the IRCs running VPNs and remote identity servers we’ve actually gotten to the bottom of this story and while the idiots at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism are willing to post anything to get them noticed without actual fact checking beyond the superficial data that is Twitters standard geodata, giant buffoons, like Rian Johnson will hide behind ANY excuse not to take responsibility for the built up, plot hole ridden, “Kill the characters off as soon as they were developed in the last episode”, mess that was TLJ. This article was written out of California, by the way, no Russian Trolls here RIAN.
-R. Rankin