How Justice League Snyder Cut Was Driven By Bots And An Advertising Agency

A toxic social media movement had already been building around the director since at least 2018, with online cries for Warner Bros. Justice League two years later. As Snyder’s demands escalated behind the scenes — including for more money to complete his four-hour directorial for HBO Max and access to the intellectual property — So did a flood of attacks aimed at Warner Bros.: calls for boycotts, demands that some executives be fired, even threats against their lives. Fans went after anyone or anything deemed a threat to the so-called SnyderVerse, including directors like Adam Wingard (whose Godzilla vs. Kong released on HBO Max 13 days later Snyder Cut and stole some of his thunder) and movies like Wonder Woman 1984 (for which Jones was the author). The attack involved cyber harassment, prompting the involvement of Warner Bros.’ security department. (A spokesperson for Warner Bros. Discovery declined to comment, “as this matter predates current leadership and the new company.”) And as chaos ensued, many insiders questioned just how organic the SnyderVerse legion really was. According to two reports commissioned by WarnerMedia and recently obtained by Rolling rock, at least 13 percent of the accounts involved in the discussion about the Snyder Cut were deemed fake, well above the 3-5 percent that cyber experts say they typically see on any trending topic. (In public filings, Twitter has estimated that the percentage of daily active accounts on its platform that are “fake or spam” is less than five percent.) So while Snyder had dozens of genuine, flesh-and-blood fans, these real stans were boosted by a disproportionate number of fake accounts.
Two companies contacted Rolling rock that monitor the authenticity of social media campaigns, Q5id and Graphika, have also detected inauthentic activity coming from the SnyderVerse community. And another company, Alethea Group, discovered that the domain forsnydercut.com — which it claims made the hashtag #ReleaseTheSnyderCut go viral in May 2018 and became the landing hub for efforts to put Snyder back at the helm of the DC universe — was, at least at one point, registered to a person who also ran a now-defunct advertising agency that promoted its ability to bring “cheap, instant Avatar traffic to your website.” Rolling rock spoke to more than 20 people who worked on the prototype as well Justice League and Snyder’s cut, most of which believe the director was working to manipulate the ongoing campaign. Snyder claims that “if anyone” was pulling the strings in the social media frenzy, it was Warner Bros. which was “trying to leverage my fan base to boost subscribers to their new streaming service.” But a source claims, “Zach was like a Lex Luthor wreaking havoc.” For a time, rival studios and digital marketing executives were excited by the SnyderVerse’s fan mobilization, wondering how they too could better harness the power of social media. But soon, many questioned what seemed like suspicious activity: Hashtags like #ReleaseTheSnyderCut saturated social media starting in late 2019, garnering hundreds of thousands of tweets a day to pressure Warner Bros. to release the director’s cut of the film. And when the studio finally released Synder’s new cut in March 2021, #RestoreTheSnyderVerse, a new fan hashtag calling for Warner Bros. to greenlight more of Snyder’s DC movies, garnered more than a million tweets in one day. “Just look at the drop: [That hashtag was] Trending with a million tweets a day when they wanted to release the Snyder Cut. And it dropped to 40,000 within days,” says a digital marketing executive, who claims the phenomenon has become the talk of Hollywood. “You don’t see a drop like that biologically.” Instead, the executive says, it appears to be a classic example of “weaponizing a movement.” In mid-January 2021, three months before his Snyder Cut Justice League Finally released, an Instagram account with the handle @daniras_illust posted a gruesome image depicting the decapitated heads of Johns, DC Films president Walter Hamada, and former Warner Bros. president. Pictures Group, Toby Emmerich. The image quickly went viral among fans, with SnyderVerse devotees even tagging the social media accounts of some of the trio’s children. It was troubling posts like these that prompted WarnerMedia, concerned about the safety of its employees, to take the unusual step of quietly commissioning a series of reports from a third-party cybersecurity firm to analyze the trolling. The reports had taken on a legendary status at Warner Bros. Some even doubted their existence. But a small group at the parent company had access to them. The main exhibit, dated April 2021 and titled “SnyderCut Social Media Presence,” offers a chilling look at the powerful movement. “After researching online conversations about the Snyder Cut of the Justice Leagueof the release, specifically of the hashtags “ReleaseTheSnyderCut” and “RestoreTheSnyderVerse” on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram; [the analysts] detected an increase in negative activity generated by both real and fake authors,” the report concludes. “A recognized community consisted of real and fake writers spreading negative content about WarnerMedia for not restoring 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.” In addition, the report said, many writers were spreading “harmful content” about then-Warner Bros. president Ann Sarnoff (who had called fan trolling “reprehensible” in an interview with Variety), “with the majority of writers calling her a liar for claiming there is no Snyder Cut of the film and calling for Warner Media to fire her. These writers also began using the hashtag “BoycottWarnerBros.” Another internal report found an active subcommunity attacking Johns. Rolling rock asked three other cyber and social media intelligence firms, including Q5id, to collect data about the SnyderVerse from the months leading up to the release of the Snyder Cut in 2021, looking for signs of inauthentic social media activity. (This activity could take many forms, including attempts to manipulate discourse involving networks of inauthentic accounts operated by humans or the use of software to automate account posting and engagement activity, often referred to as “bots.”) Q5id Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer Becky Wanta says her company’s analysis shows “there’s no doubt bots are involved.” Wanta explains: “There are certain patterns that the bots we’ve seen here emit. They arrive almost at the same time in huge numbers. And many times the origin of thousands or even millions of messages can be traced back to one or two sources. Sometimes, they may be located on unusual servers in remote countries. And their content will be exactly the same.” That means a fanfare fueled by fake accounts helped shake up a major studio — at an eventual cost to Warner Bros. over $100 million – to re-release a film that had already bombed years earlier. The campaign didn’t end with the release of the Snyder Cut on March 18, 2021. The wrap reported in May that the robots may have contributed to Snyder winning two fan favorite awards at this year’s Oscars. And according to social media company Graphika, the pattern of a mostly organic social media fan frenzy fueled by a small number of authentic accounts is still playing out. “We see clear signs of coordinated online activity since May and June of this year, when several communities promoted hashtags promoting Zack Snyder and mocking Warner Bros.,” says Avneesh Chandra, data analyst at Graphika. Rolling rock. As examples, Graphika points to accounts that seemed to exist only to flood Twitter and the responses of WarnerMedia’s social media accounts with constant pro-Snyder hashtags. Chandra downplays the effectiveness of this inauthentic activity, noting that “many of these accounts are spam and have failed to cut through the noise,” but says it’s clear some manipulation is going on. “Most of that activity was real and passionate users getting direction from influential figures in the pro-Snyder community,” says Chandra. “We regularly see these kinds of adversarial social media campaigns led by real people tuning in online. When you’re kicking the hornet’s nest of a large, dedicated and conflicted fan community, it can be just as, if not more, terrifying than looking down…

title: “How Justice League Snyder Cut Was Driven By Bots And An Advertising Agency " ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-23” author: “Chad Adler”

A toxic social media movement had already been building around the director since at least 2018, with online cries for Warner Bros. Justice League two years later. As Snyder’s demands escalated behind the scenes — including for more money to complete his four-hour directorial for HBO Max and access to the intellectual property — So did a flood of attacks aimed at Warner Bros.: calls for boycotts, demands that some executives be fired, even threats against their lives. Fans went after anyone or anything deemed a threat to the so-called SnyderVerse, including directors like Adam Wingard (whose Godzilla vs. Kong released on HBO Max 13 days later Snyder Cut and stole some of his thunder) and movies like Wonder Woman 1984 (for which Jones was the author). The attack involved cyber harassment, prompting the involvement of Warner Bros.’ security department. (A spokesperson for Warner Bros. Discovery declined to comment, “as this matter predates current leadership and the new company.”) And as chaos ensued, many insiders questioned just how organic the SnyderVerse legion really was. According to two reports commissioned by WarnerMedia and recently obtained by Rolling rock, at least 13 percent of the accounts involved in the discussion about the Snyder Cut were deemed fake, well above the 3-5 percent that cyber experts say they typically see on any trending topic. (In public filings, Twitter has estimated that the percentage of daily active accounts on its platform that are “fake or spam” is less than five percent.) So while Snyder had dozens of genuine, flesh-and-blood fans, these real stans were boosted by a disproportionate number of fake accounts.
Two companies contacted Rolling rock that monitor the authenticity of social media campaigns, Q5id and Graphika, have also detected inauthentic activity coming from the SnyderVerse community. And another company, Alethea Group, discovered that the domain forsnydercut.com — which it claims made the hashtag #ReleaseTheSnyderCut go viral in May 2018 and became the landing hub for efforts to put Snyder back at the helm of the DC universe — was, at least at one point, registered to a person who also ran a now-defunct advertising agency that promoted its ability to bring “cheap, instant Avatar traffic to your website.” Rolling rock spoke to more than 20 people who worked on the prototype as well Justice League and Snyder’s cut, most of which believe the director was working to manipulate the ongoing campaign. Snyder claims that “if anyone” was pulling the strings in the social media frenzy, it was Warner Bros. which was “trying to leverage my fan base to boost subscribers to their new streaming service.” But a source claims, “Zach was like a Lex Luthor wreaking havoc.” For a time, rival studios and digital marketing executives were excited by the SnyderVerse’s fan mobilization, wondering how they too could better harness the power of social media. But soon, many questioned what seemed like suspicious activity: Hashtags like #ReleaseTheSnyderCut saturated social media starting in late 2019, garnering hundreds of thousands of tweets a day to pressure Warner Bros. to release the director’s cut of the film. And when the studio finally released Synder’s new cut in March 2021, #RestoreTheSnyderVerse, a new fan hashtag calling for Warner Bros. to greenlight more of Snyder’s DC movies, garnered more than a million tweets in one day. “Just look at the drop: [That hashtag was] Trending with a million tweets a day when they wanted to release the Snyder Cut. And it dropped to 40,000 within days,” says a digital marketing executive, who claims the phenomenon has become the talk of Hollywood. “You don’t see a drop like that biologically.” Instead, the executive says, it appears to be a classic example of “weaponizing a movement.” In mid-January 2021, three months before his Snyder Cut Justice League Finally released, an Instagram account with the handle @daniras_illust posted a gruesome image depicting the decapitated heads of Johns, DC Films president Walter Hamada, and former Warner Bros. president. Pictures Group, Toby Emmerich. The image quickly went viral among fans, with SnyderVerse devotees even tagging the social media accounts of some of the trio’s children. It was troubling posts like these that prompted WarnerMedia, concerned about the safety of its employees, to take the unusual step of quietly commissioning a series of reports from a third-party cybersecurity firm to analyze the trolling. The reports had taken on a legendary status at Warner Bros. Some even doubted their existence. But a small group at the parent company had access to them. The main exhibit, dated April 2021 and titled “SnyderCut Social Media Presence,” offers a chilling look at the powerful movement. “After researching online conversations about the Snyder Cut of the Justice Leagueof the release, specifically of the hashtags “ReleaseTheSnyderCut” and “RestoreTheSnyderVerse” on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram; [the analysts] detected an increase in negative activity generated by both real and fake authors,” the report concludes. “A recognized community consisted of real and fake writers spreading negative content about WarnerMedia for not restoring 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.” In addition, the report said, many writers were spreading “harmful content” about then-Warner Bros. president Ann Sarnoff (who had called fan trolling “reprehensible” in an interview with Variety), “with the majority of writers calling her a liar for claiming there is no Snyder Cut of the film and calling for Warner Media to fire her. These writers also began using the hashtag “BoycottWarnerBros.” Another internal report found an active subcommunity attacking Johns. Rolling rock asked three other cyber and social media intelligence firms, including Q5id, to collect data about the SnyderVerse from the months leading up to the release of the Snyder Cut in 2021, looking for signs of inauthentic social media activity. (This activity could take many forms, including attempts to manipulate discourse involving networks of inauthentic accounts operated by humans or the use of software to automate account posting and engagement activity, often referred to as “bots.”) Q5id Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer Becky Wanta says her company’s analysis shows “there’s no doubt bots are involved.” Wanta explains: “There are certain patterns that the bots we’ve seen here emit. They arrive almost at the same time in huge numbers. And many times the origin of thousands or even millions of messages can be traced back to one or two sources. Sometimes, they may be located on unusual servers in remote countries. And their content will be exactly the same.” That means a fanfare fueled by fake accounts helped shake up a major studio — at an eventual cost to Warner Bros. over $100 million – to re-release a film that had already bombed years earlier. The campaign didn’t end with the release of the Snyder Cut on March 18, 2021. The wrap reported in May that the robots may have contributed to Snyder winning two fan favorite awards at this year’s Oscars. And according to social media company Graphika, the pattern of a mostly organic social media fan frenzy fueled by a small number of authentic accounts is still playing out. “We see clear signs of coordinated online activity since May and June of this year, when several communities promoted hashtags promoting Zack Snyder and mocking Warner Bros.,” says Avneesh Chandra, data analyst at Graphika. Rolling rock. As examples, Graphika points to accounts that seemed to exist only to flood Twitter and the responses of WarnerMedia’s social media accounts with constant pro-Snyder hashtags. Chandra downplays the effectiveness of this inauthentic activity, noting that “many of these accounts are spam and have failed to cut through the noise,” but says it’s clear some manipulation is going on. “Most of that activity was real and passionate users getting direction from influential figures in the pro-Snyder community,” says Chandra. “We regularly see these kinds of adversarial social media campaigns led by real people tuning in online. When you’re kicking the hornet’s nest of a large, dedicated and conflicted fan community, it can be just as, if not more, terrifying than looking down…