By Cicero Estrella
The Mercury News
First our national elections, and then “Star Wars.” Is nothing sacred to the Russians?
A University of Southern California survey found the many of the nasty online attacks on “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” actress Kelly Marie Tran were directed by Russian bots, sock puppets and trolls according to the Huffington Post.
The study sifted through the tweets about “The Last Jedi” as part of research on how political influence has now infiltrated pop culture. Morten Bay, a research fellow at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, found that 51 percent of negative tweets about the 2017 installment of the “Star Wars” franchise were “politically motivated or not even human.”
“Based on the findings in the present study, it is not fair to generalize and paint all of the ‘Last Jedi’ detractors as alt-right activists, racists or misogynists,” Bay wrote. “However, the findings … show that a majority of the negatively-poised users included in the study do express such sentiments, either in ‘The Last Jedi’-related tweets or in other tweets on their accounts.”
Tran, the first woman of color to play a significant role in the “Star Wars” franchise, was the subject of much of the online harassment, most of which was racist and sexist.
The trolling took a toll on the actress and forced her this year to withdraw temporarily from social media. Tran was born in San Diego to parents who were originally from Vietnam.
“It wasn’t their words, it’s that I started to believe them,” she wrote in the New York Times in August. “Their words seemed to confirm what growing up as a woman and a person of color already taught me: that I belonged in margins and spaces, valid only as a minor character in their lives and stories.”
The USC research looked at 967 tweets, each from a different account, directed at “The Last Jedi” director Rian Johnson. It found 206 expressing negative sentiments, 44 of which appeared to be not human or trolls, including 16 that appeared to Russian trolls. Sixty-one other accounts had clear political agendas against the film.
Bay believes the Russian trolls sought to “weaponize Star Wars criticism as an instrument of information warfare with the purpose of pushing for political change.”
Tran is set to return as Rose Tico in December 2019 in the yet-to-be-titled Episode IX, the finale of the latest “Star Wars” trilogy. She defied her tormentors in August by reactivating her Instagram account.
“You might know me as Kelly,” she wrote at the time. “I am the first woman of color to have a leading role in a ‘Star Wars’ movie. I am the first Asian woman to appear on the cover of Vanity Fair. My real name is Loan. And I am just getting started.”
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