Putin's trolling Star Wars

Annalee Newitz, What Arguments About ‘Star Wars’ Say About Democracy, NYTimes, 24 Dec 2019.

And a recent study by Morten Bay, a University of Southern California digital media researcher, revealed that over 50 percent of the venom directed on Twitter at Rian Johnson, director of “The Last Jedi,” came from the same sources as Russian election meddling.

Using the analytical tools that other technologists deployed to uncover Russian influence during the 2016 election, Mr. Bay found that “bots, trolls/sock puppets or political activists” were using the “Star Wars” debate “to propagate political messages supporting extreme right-wing causes and the discrimination of gender, race or sexuality” and that “a number of these users appear to be Russian trolls.” So it seems that it was political operatives, not fans, who were denigrating the movie and fomenting some of the virulent racism and misogyny against its cast.

Using “Star Wars” as the vehicle was a canny move by the trolls. Fans, like the American electorate, are polarized and angry. Online and in real life, they scream at one another about how Luke Skywalker would really behave decades after finding out that his dad was Darth Vader.

Often these fights begin with someone asserting that the latest “Star Wars” movie ruined their childhood. That’s not wrong. An attack on “Star Wars” is an attack on what many adults of George Lucas’s generation were taught as children: that the most important good guys are generally white men, and the biggest threat on earth is a superweapon.

The problem is that nobody agrees anymore on what the good guys look like, nor what this century’s global threat really is. Fights over “Star Wars” cut to the core of American identity — all the way down to our childhood selves — because they aren’t just squabbles over whether Rey’s Force powers are realistic. They’re about who we are as a nation, and how we will survive as a people in the future.