After his tumultuous exit from the DCEU due to tragic personal circumstances, many believed Zack Snyder’s vision of a Justice League movie was lost forever – that is until the Snyder Cut movement took over social media and helped bring the director’s version of the DCEU movie to life. Now, a report from Rolling Stone alleges that fake social media accounts were responsible for a large portion of the Snyder Cut movement.
Back in 2017, Joss Whedon took over directorial duties from Snyder and released what is widely considered one of the weakest action movies in the DC timeline. Fans of Snyder’s work weren’t happy, and from 2018 onwards, the Snyder Cut movement picked up incredible momentum, eventually becoming so strong that Warner decided to grant Snyder his director’s cut.
As time went on, and more investigation has been carried out, it appears that at least some of the movement was pushed by fake social media accounts, or bots. Now, according to Rolling Stone, a report from within Warner Media has emerged which reveals the extent of bot activity on the campaign.
Due to safety concerns regarding Warner employees, the company decided to launch an investigation into the source of the social media campaigns. It was long rumoured that the activity was suspicious, but Warner’s report appears to suggest that is certainly the case now.
“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 found.
Rolling Stone itself questioned staff from cybersecurity and social media intelligence firm Q5id, including chief information officer and chief technology officer Becky Wanta. According to Wanta, “There’s no question that bots were involved.”
“There are certain patterns that bots give off that we saw here. They arrive at almost the same time in huge numbers,” Wanta continued. “And many times the origin of thousands or even millions of messages can be traced to a single source or two. Sometimes, they can be traced to unusual servers in remote countries. And their content will be precisely similar.”
While it has certainly been difficult to get to the bottom of the ongoing Snyder Cut saga, this report does seem to be fairly conclusive in determining the existence of bots among the movement. The people responsible for said accounts however, remains to be seen.