The paper, titled Weaponizing the haters: The Last Jedi and the strategic politicization of pop culture through social media manipulation, comes from USC Annenberg research fellow Morten Bay.
A new study (h/t The Hollywood Reporter) dives into The Last Jedi online backlash and the negative tweets that swarmed Johnson’s Twitter account in the weeks and months following the film’s release.
Most astonishingly, the study finds evidence that more than half of the negative online responses to The Last Jedi weren’t even from humans, but as the study suggests, likely Russian trolls.