The story so far: Executives, performers, and writers in movie, TV, video game, and comic book companies are under siege.  Efforts to include diverse, marginalized, minority characters and social justice story elements in pop culture have been met with mass campaigns of mean words and down-votes deployed by organized groups and bot armies.

Self-identified victims describe their adversaries as members of a basement-dwelling underclass of ill-tempered, unemployed, loveless losers.  Like their preferred, outdated heroes, these enemy combatants are mostly white, male, straight Americans.

One subgroup suspected of harboring ominous fans is the geeks.  They’re mostly male, white, straight, and American.  Many geeks make and watch videos discussing movies, shows, games, and pop culture merchandise.  Interestingly, many of the geeks hosting video channels are so gracious that they willingly grant, without evidence, that among geek fans, there are a few bigots.  Their videos regularly denounce targeted harassment, and they tell viewers not tp contact or post comments on websites of entertainment industry figures whose products or activities they discuss.

As early as the announcement of filming for Star Trek: The Next Generation, geeks’ trepidation about changing pop culture in conformity to new worldviews has been dismissed as unjustifiably rejecting positive innovation.  The assumption that mindless bigots are part of geek fandom is a predictable development.

The 2019 release of the high-budget, low-anticipation Captain Marvel movie coincided with review website Rotten Tomatoes “suddenly” discovering that viewers’ ability to review movies before the official release, a longstanding feature, turned out to be a “bug” that needed immediate action.  Also discovered were a number of negative reviews posted that were “nearly” trolling.  R.T. snapped into action, disabling (temporarily) some website functionality and removing 54,000 viewer reviews of the 58,000 posted during the first five hours that Captain Marvel was showing.  R.T. described these changes as a service to fans, who might otherwise miss an opportunity to spend money and time on not enjoying a film.

Flash forward to November 3, 2023.  Former MMA fighter and former Disney Star Wars star Gina Carano posted comments about Disney CEO Bob Iger’s 2016 decision against purchasing Twitter because users included too many bots.  Carano noted that Twitter ownership affords much control over the direction of public discourse.  But, a corporation could achieve the same control of the conversation, at far less cost, by deploying a bot army.  She also speculates that using a bot army to generate apparently widespread disapproval of an individual would be useful to justify canceling that person.  After controversy arose over her own indifference to pronouns, questioning masking, and a short-lived post warning against mindlessly following authoritarians, Disney cited disapproval posted by fans to justifying firing Gina.

On November 1, 2023, Rolling Stone published “HBO Bosses Used ‘Secret‘ Fake Accounts to Troll TV Critics.” Current HBO CEO and chairman Casey Bloys and senior V.P. Kathleen McCaffrey ordered staff to create fake social media accounts for posting snarky responses to unwanted criticism and pro-HBO comments not traceable to HBO.

Bloys’s apology for harassing critics was discussed in a November 2, 2023 video, “Hollywood’s Lie Exposed.”  Geeks and Gamers’ commenter Jeremy doubts Bloys’s sincerity.  He also mentioned widespread and longstanding suspicions of a phenomenon regularly arising during online pop culture controversies.  Appearing from nowhere, social media accounts with a handful of followers and uniformly favorable opinions of all progressive alterations to entertainment franchises were immediately boosted by massive numbers of re-postings and up-votes.

Negative fan responses to movies like Disney Star Wars’ flops were used to stoke suspicions that disappointed fans were connected to more than just organized hate messaging campaigns.  In 2016, they were alleged to be connected to the same, now-discredited imaginary Russian trolls long blamed for Donald Trump’s unexpected election victory.

With admissions of mass campaigns and bot activity launched from the side proclaiming themselves victims of large-scale, organized campaigns, we have reason for further skepticism.

Consider the fact that geek-made videos, websites, accounts on fan-support sites like Locals and Patreon, and crowd-funded creative projects, such as original comic books, generate income and popular support that helps growth of online channels and projects.

Meanwhile, organized, multi-year mass campaigns targeting entertainment figures for harassment generate no income, no public approval and no benefit, for those engaging in these extensive, long-running, large-scale endeavors.  Opinions — from targets, allies, unhappy fans, and bystanders of targeted harassment — are uniformly negative.  Apparently, the possibility that mean words and down-votes demoralize high-status strangers is its own reward.

More questions ensue.  Why would people engage in extensive, unrewarded, uniformly denounced actions for years, yet take it only so far, and no farther?  Why are other corporations and executives with their own longstanding contractual relationships to these same intellectual properties entirely spared?

It’s not just the corporations producing movies, shows, games, and publications that are linked to pop culture franchises that have been the focus of controversy.  Other companies manufacture and distribute tangible, real-world products connected to the same franchises that are already said to provoke mass internet negativity campaigns.  They produce toys, dolls, figurines, costumes, props, T-shirts, posters, mugs, socks, blankets, kitchen equipment (e.g., the Starship Enterprise pizza cutter), etc.  Manufacturers and retailers have their own websites, where products can be purchased, reviewed, and rated by the public.

There are no reports of executives of these companies being targets of harassment such as that plaguing their entertainment industry counterparts.  The main drag on merchandise companies’ bottom lines is ongoing low sales of dumpy purple-haired action figures representing boring middle-aged characters from unpopular movies.

There’s one final question.  Is there any evidence of organized, large-scale grassroots groups engaged in aggressive, multi-year, mass negativity campaigns, engaged in commenting, downvoting, or launching masses of bots?  Do humans ever engage in extensive, long-running, thankless efforts destined to generate neither cash nor acclaim?  Why would displeased fans feel any need to go to extraordinary lengths to undermine underperforming entertainment franchises, when sub-par performance is clear in the downward numbers of viewers, subscribers, stock prices, and merchandise sales?

Is anyone else envisioning a final act to this drama where an industry figure admits it was all a prank, but it really happens all the time to other people, and “I only started it because we all need have a conversation”?

Image: Brecht Bug via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.