Snyder Cut: Fake accounts led campaign for Zack Snyder’s version of Justice League, report says

since the launch of Justice League in 2017, an intense movement of requests for the “Snyder Cut” [ou corte de Snyder, em português] took over social media. Fans who were disappointed by the interference of Warner Bros. in the film of A.D asked the studio to release the director’s original cut Zack Snyder.

However, according to a report released by the Rolling Stone USA, it was revealed that at least 13% of those accounts that led the campaign were bots, that is, fake accounts with messages programmed to increase requests for a new movie. The data were recorded by the agencies Q5id and Graphika, contracted by the magazine.

That number is well above the 3-5% of bots that cyber experts say they typically see on any topic that becomes popular on the internet. Despite Snyder having many real fans, that amount was amplified by a disproportionate number of fake accounts.

In addition, a third company, Alethea Group, discovered that the domain forsnydercut.com, which it claims is responsible for go viral the hashtag #ReleaseTheSnyderCut was, at least at one point, commanded by a person who also ran a now-defunct advertising agency that promoted the ability to bring “cheap, instant traffic to your website.”

THE Rolling Stone USA heard more than 20 people involved in the original version of Justice League and most believe the director was working to manipulate the Snyder Cut campaign. The filmmaker stated that, “if anyone” was taking advantage of the movement on the networks, that someone was the Warner Bros. who was “trying to leverage my fan base to bolster subscribers to their new streaming service.” However, one source claimed that “zack it was like a Lex Luthor causing havoc.”

For a while, rival studios and digital marketing executives were intrigued by the rallying fans for the cut of Snyder, trying to understand how they could take advantage of this movement as well. But they soon became suspicious of increased activity on social media.

In 2019, the hashtag #ReleaseTheSnyderCut became saturated in the media, accumulating hundreds of thousands of tweets a day to put pressure on the public. Warner Bros. to release the director’s cut of the film. And when that finally happened, in March 2021, the hashtag #RestoreTheSnyderVerse, which called for more films from the director, reached the mark of more than a million tweets in one day.

According to a digital marketing executive interviewed by the magazine, the phenomenon has become a hot topic in Hollywood. “You don’t see something like that organically,” he said, noting that the situation looks like a classic example of “setting up a movement.”

The version of Justice League is available at HBO Max since 2021 and has two hours longer than the original.