Thread by @notcapnamerica

NEW from @RollingStone:

3 third party agencies confirm an unusual number of inauthentic accounts have been posting across Twitter and other social platforms to bully Zac Snyder naysayers, and influence Warner Bros. to release the "Snyder Cut" and restore the "Snyder-Verse" to DC

Fans went after anyone or anything deemed a danger to the so-called SnyderVerse, including directors like Adam Wingard and movies like Wonder Woman 1984 The onslaught included cyber harassment so severe Warner Bros. security division got involved.

Rolling Stone spoke with more than 20 people involved with both the original Justice League and Snyder’s cut, most of whom believe that the director was working to manipulate the ongoing campaign.

Hashtags like #ReleaseTheSnyderCut saturated social media beginning in late 2019, racking up hundreds of thousands of tweets a day to pressure Warner Bros. to release the director’s version of the film. A

And when the studio finally released Synder’s new cut in March 2021, #RestoreTheSnyderVerse, a fledgling fan hashtag calling for Warner Bros. to greenlight more of Snyder’s DC films, racked up more than a million tweets in one day.

“Just look at the drop: "It was trending at a million tweets a day for when they wanted to release the Snyder Cut. And it dropped down to 40,000 within days,” says one digital marketing executive. “You don’t see a drop like that organically.”

In Jan 2021, 3 months before the Snyder Cut of Justice League was finally released, an IG account with the handle @daniras_ilust posted a gruesome image depicting the decapitated heads of Johns, DC Films president Walter Hamada, and former WB Pictures chairman Toby Emmerich.

The image rapidly circulated among the fandom, with SnyderVerse devotees even tagging social media accounts of some of the CHILDREN of the trio. WarnerMedia, concerned about the safety of its employees, commissioned reports from a 3rd-party security firm to analyze the trolling.

“There are certain patterns that bots give off that we saw here. They arrive at almost the same time in huge numbers. And many times the origin of thousands or even millions of messages can be traced to a single source or two."

That means a fandom amplified by fake accounts helped shake down a major studio — at an ultimate cost to Warner Bros. of more than $100 million — to re-release a movie that had already bombed years earlier.

The campaign didn’t end with the March 18, 2021, release of the Snyder Cut. The Wrap reported in May that bots may have factored into Snyder winning two fan-favorite awards at this year’s Oscars.

While Snyder denies it, one source tells Rolling Stone the director hired a digital marketing firm to juice fan engagement back in 2016, when his $250 million film Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice was savaged by critics (earning a dismal 29-percent RottenTomatoes rating)

Executives who didn't fall in line about supporting the release of the "Snyder cut" faced a social media beating. Former DC Entertainment president Diane Nelson deleted her Twitter account in September 2018

Pricey publicity stunts ensued, like a towering Times Square ad — which can cost more than $50,000 per day — and a plane flying over Comic Con with a banner calling for DC to release the Snyder Cut. None of the press reports at the time addressed who was footing the bill.

“Where was the fundraiser? Why didn’t we ever see a Kickstarter campaign from the fans?” asks one insider who became skeptical of the grassroots nature of the SnyderVerse movement, considering the cost of such marketing endeavors.

The fandom — which has been dubbed “toxic” by such outlets as Vanity Fair , which compared the Snyder fans to "Gamer Gate" — continued to push, and Snyder began negotiations with Warner Bros. on a Justice League redo in January 2020.

This story about Kiersey Clemons being cast for a Flash stand-alone movie also incurred the wrath of the Snyder fandom just days before the Snyder Cut release in March 2021. Snyder called the reporter to demand several sentences be removed.

hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-n…

Zac Snyder: “I’m just telling you what the fans are going to do. Trust me, they are pretty, pretty, pretty rough,” he warned. The sentences stayed, and the SnyderVerse throng descended.

When fans review-bombed Adam Wingard’s Godzilla vs. Kong, sources say the director asked Snyder through an intermediary to tell his fans to stand down — and that Snyder refused, saying "I don't control my fans."

Snyder's response to this article: rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-m…