Nope, but that kind of reinforces my initial reaction... which is that it's kind of alarming that they didn't have to work very hard to get a lot of people running down that road with them.
Also of note in the article is that most of the people that supposedly hated TLJ for political reasons seemingly had little to no interest in Star Wars prior to choosing the film as a battlefield in their crusade. So there is truth to the notion that it's unfair to dismiss criticism of the film by fans and diehards as reactionary bias. It seems more likely that such TLJ reactionaries were useful idiots for Russian trolls from outside the actual fanbase than that there is a large, dark undercurrent of white supremacy among Star Wars fans.
Bottom line is there are a scary amount of people here ready to jump on board with some of these reactionary ideas planted by Russian trolls, but it's unclear how much of that is an actual reflection of the fanbases and how much is ideologues hijacking these debates at the unwitting direction of highly sophisticated trolls. It makes me wonder about Gamergate and Ghostbusters and some of these other nerd-culture misogyny outbreaks?
While I agree with pretty much everything above, I wonder why it's hard to believe that the reactionary jerks belonging to the so-called 'alt-right' who inundated social platforms with hate-filled speech simply acted out of their own accord, and that it had absolutely nothing to do with the similarly reactionary and hate-filled messages posted by this tiny number of Russian trolls.
Why are we so prompt to say that the Russian trolls
triggered all this, without the smallest amount of evidence? Why is it so hard to assume that maybe, just maybe, there is an increasingly vocal minority of reactionary jerks out there, not in Russia or in Russian farm trolls, but amongst us, in Europe, in the US, etc. that actually act this way not because Russian trolls showed them the way but because that's what they want to do?
I guess it's much easier to find a culprit on the other side of the world than it is to acknowledge and cope with the rot in our own societies.
As far as I'm concerned, and I don't have numbers to back this up but I'd like to see numbers proving otherwise, Russian trolls have a minute and insignificant influence over the weak minds of a handful of teenagers who don't even believe in the things they share or repeat on social media, and will eventually grow out of it. And the majority of the people who filled Twitter and Facebook accounts with racist and misogynistic messages, well, they have nothing to do with Russian trolls. They are amongst us, and they don't need anyone else, Russian or otherwise, to say the things they say and think the way they think.
