Dealing a crushing blow to the validity of the RestoreTheSynderVerse movement and The Flash’s Oscar win for “Most Decent Moment,” Rolling Stone published a bombshell report earlier today detailing the ways in which fake accounts fueled the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut campaign that took social media by storm a few years back and left us stuck with an even bigger version of the Justice League. As hard as it is to believe, a large portion of the Snyder Cut’s champions were bots or fake accounts, some of which, according to Rolling Stone, Snyder helped whip into a frenzy between the first release of Justice League until well after the bowing of Snyder’s version. HBO Max. Two reports commissioned by WarnerMedia found that “at least 13 percent of the accounts involved in the discussion about the Snyder Cut were determined to be fake.” The norm on Twitter is about 3 to 5 percent, so as the agency reports, “real stans were boosted by a disproportionate number of fake accounts.” A report concluded: After researching online conversations about the release of the Snyder Cut of Justice League, specifically the hashtags “ReleaseTheSnyderCut” and “RestoreTheSnyderVerse” on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, [the analysts] found an increase in negative activity generated by both real and fake authors. A recognized community consisted of real and fake writers spreading negative content about WarnerMedia for not bringing back the ‘SnyderVerse’. In addition, three main leaders were identified among the authors scanned on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram — one leader on each platform. These leaders received the highest percentage of loyalty and have many followers, which gives them the ability to influence public opinion. But the report is even more damning of Snyder, whom Rolling Stone accuses of actively manipulating the media and weaponizing his fans against studio executives and journalists. As a source told the report, “Zach was like a Lex Luthor wreaking havoc.” After 2019, when the popularity surrounding the Snyder Cut movement led to your typical series of death threats and memes depicting the decapitated heads of Warner Bros. executives. being sent to the families of said executives, Snyder continued to tap into his fan base. In one instance, he reportedly warned a reporter who ran a story about a Flash casting announcement that he disagreed with that his fans “are beautiful, beautiful, very rough.” According to the report, much of Snyder’s anger at Warner Bros. on the release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League was over the producer credits originally given to Geoff Johns and Jon Berg. Cyborg actor Ray Fisher previously accused Johns and Berg of allowing director Joss Whedon, who Fisher claimed was abusive, on the set of Justice League. Snyder wanted their names removed from Snyder’s cut, and after they were slow to do so, he told an executive, “Joff and John are dragging their feet to get their names off my cut. Now, I’m going to destroy them on social media.” The piece also pretty much blames Snyder for paying for Snyder Cut publicity stunts like the Times Square ad (the article says these can cost more than $50,000 a day) and a plane flying over Comic Con which advertises Synder. Snyder denied this and most of the claims made in the piece. But as one source put it, those stunts were “just more orchestrated bullshit from Zach.” The whole report is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at a movie that simply shouldn’t be, a film that the studio deemed a “complete failure” when the original piece aired in 2017. But a quote from an unnamed insider in the piece explains why: “$73 million while people lost their jobs at the studio for a director of a movie that had already lost hundreds of millions.” Read the full report, which includes stolen hard drives, the web of conspiracy surrounding the fake accounts, and the war on Martian Manhunter in the movie.
