I haven’t watched “The Director And The Jedi”, the documentary about making TLJ that these “russian bot” stories are coming from, because the TLJ digital release doesn’t come out until April 9 where I live.
So I thought I’d ask on twitter if anyone had, and if they could give context — ie did Rian mention bots at all? did he mention them as a joke? or did he say it for serious?
Because, looking at the article that was going around, the only direct quote from Rian Johnson was, “It’s amazing, there’s a coordinated effort by these Russian accounts. Hundreds of them,” and I kind of thought, if he did make some claim about Russian bots, wouldn’t you use THAT as your quote?
Someone who had seen it got back to me and said RJ had been talking about just a campaign on Twitter (and the context was of it being fans, from Russia) and then made a joke about bots, lol. (I blacked out their username because I didn’t bother getting their permission to screenshot)
(disclaimer: like I say, I haven’t seen it and I’m going off one person’s impression, but they’re, like, not a fool.)
The io9 article actually rips off (sorry, sources from, because they at least left a back link, that’s how this churnalism works, people have to produce a certain number of articles a day, they can’t all be original) an article on Film School Rejects, and that’s where the really stupid “russian bots? targeting tlj? for general hux? that sounds legit! yes for real! it must be, uuuh, because they love authoritarianism” angle came from, which the io9 writer cited as “some say” or whatever.
the best part is either that, or the fact that the io9 writer, wishing to contribute something to the story, sourced and embedded a tweet from the #huxlive hashtag that not only included some Kylux art, but actually mentioned the ship.
and so that’s how come the statement “Rian Johnson believes that Russian bots targeted the production of TLJ to promote one of the villains as good totalitarian rep” doesn’t quite stand up, whereas the statement “clickbait headlines and context collapse are a pain in the arse” does.
“reblog if you’re a russian huxbot” is still a plenty good meme though
TechieHux 