At the 94th Academy Awards earlier this year, the Zack Snyder-directed films Army of the Dead and Zack Snyder's Justice League came out on top of the two new fan-voted categories, Oscars Fan Favorite and Oscars Cheer Moment, respectively. However, a new report suggests that the voting may have been rigged thanks to Twitter bots backing Snyder's work.
Ahead of this year's Oscars, fans could take to Twitter to vote for their own "Best Picture" pick, if you will, in the form of Oscars Fan Favorite. They could also vote for their favorite movie moment of all time as part of the Oscars Cheer Moment category. The moment where the Flash (Ezra Miller) enters the Speed Force in Snyder's director's cut of Justice League ultimately won Cheer Moment, while the director's zombie heist film Army of the Dead was named Oscars Fan Favorite. According to TheWrap, however, two reports from the hashtag analytics tracking tool Tweetbinder find that "the most active contributors to both polls were autonomous web programs," which "cast thousands of fake votes" for Snyder's movies.
According to University of Maryland professor David Kirsch, who studies fanbots, the Snyder fan accounts who voted for the director's films "certainly do not look like they were generated by a human user." That said, TheWrap notes that these accounts were "on the border of [Kirsch's] research team's cutoff point to definitively declare them bots."
Still, the use of bots seems likely, given some curiosities pertaining to the voting -- such as massive one-day jumps in the number of ballots cast. For example, on Feb. 27 -- exactly one month before the Oscars ceremony -- 25,000 votes were counted. While Snyder certainly has a dedicated fanbase, this was a significant increase over previous weeks, during which the daily number of votes cast ranged from 4,000 to 15,000.
Telescope, the firm that actually ran the poll, did not respond to TheWrap's "repeated" requests for comment. A representative for Snyder himself also declined to comment. However, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is reportedly standing by the results of the poll.
According to one insider, the voting was "limited to 20 votes per Twitter handle, barred accounts less than 24 hours old and included votes cast on the Academy website." Under these parameters, Army of the Dead was the "clear winner" of the Oscars Fan Favorite category. Furthermore, the Academy is apparently considering running a similar poll next year.
As for Justice League, the mythical "Snyder Cut" of the 2017 DC Extended Universe film finally saw the light of day in 2021 following a massive fan campaign. Interestingly, though, the Israeli company Cyabra previously discovered that of the many accounts calling for DC and Warner Bros. to "#ReleaseTheSnyderCut," approximately 25,000 were bots. That being said, Cyabra also declined to issue a statement to TheWrap.
Source: TheWrap