As we all know, the 2022 Oscars ceremony was a fairly unremarkable, muted affair. But the scandals just keep on coming. According to TheWrap, the highly-controversial fan-voted Oscars, which saw Zack Snyder’s cut of DCEU movie Justice League win the Oscars Cheer Moment award, may have been rigged by bot accounts.
The outlet reported that data from the hashtag analytics tracking tool Tweetbinder, found that the most active contributors to the ‘Cheer Moment’ and ‘Fan Favourite’ award polls (which was won by another Snyder flick, Army of the Dead) were autonomous web programs.
These programs, the report claims, appear to have cast thousands of fake votes for thriller movie Army of the Dead and the Snyder cut of the DCEU‘s Justice League. The report points to unusual trends uncovered by Tweetbinder, such as a single-day spike on February 27 where over 25,000 votes were cast. For context, the report states that the usual daily average is between 4,000 and 15,000 votes. Speaking to TheWrap, David Kirsch, a University of Maryland professor, says that the voting activity by these kinds of accounts “certainly do not look like they were generated by a human user.”
However, it does not appear that the Oscars will be taking any measures light of these allegations against the action movie. According to an insider, who was also cited in this report, the polls were limited to 20 votes per Twitter handle, and did not allow accounts that were less than 24 hours old to vote.
The insider added that the final vote for the Fan Favourite award also included a public poll conducted on the Oscars’ website, which showed the same result as the Twitter poll.
This isn’t the only drama following the recent Oscars. The 2022 Academy Awards ceremony has been the subject of a lot of scrutiny after King Richard star Will Smith striked comedy movie actor and Oscars presenter Chris Rock live on stage, leading to him getting a ten-year-ban from attending Academy Award ceremonies.