Time to stir the pot ahead of the weekend. Remember that Academy Awards Fan Favorite and Cheer Moment that was voted on by active Twitter users? It was a bid to give the fans some kind of control of an outcome on Oscar night. Something similar to a “most popular” vote that regular movie fans could vote on. Well, a new report from The Wrap is suggesting that the most active voters for the Fan Favorite and Cheer Moment were actually autonomous web programs that appear to have been rigged in favor of filmmaker Zack Snyder.
Let me preface this by saying Zack Snyder had nothing to do with this but it appears that his very supportive and passionate fanbase may have. The report cites two findings from the hashtag analytics tracking tool Tweetbinder, which determined that the most active contributors to both polls were essentially bots. The programs seemingly cast thousands of fake votes for Snyder’s films. If you recall, Fan Favorite went to Army of the Dead, and Cheer Moment went to Justice League for The Flash entering the speed force. It just so happens that these are both Zack Snyder projects.
There was a single-day spike on February 27th that saw over 25,000 votes cast and that represented an increase from the usual daily average of between 4,000 and 15,000 votes. The report went as far as to point to a university professor by the name of David Kirsch, who insists that the activities of accounts voting for the Snyder films “certainly do not look like they were generated by a human user.”
Telescope was the tabulation firm that ran the polls and they were supposed to be limited to just 20 votes per Twitter handle. They also weren’t supposed to allow accounts that were less than 24 hours old to cast a vote. If we have learned anything over the years, Snyder fans are a determined bunch and I’m sure it wasn’t all that hard to rig the system in the first place.
That being said, The Wrap also reports that this isn’t the first time bots have worked in favor of Snyder and his projects. Two years ago, an Israeli company called Cyabra discovered that around 25,000 Twitter profiles that were demanding the release of the Snyder Cut of Justice League were actually fake accounts.
Did The Wrap discover the biggest voter fraud of the century? Feel free to discuss below!