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Comment by goldcd | Hacker News Reader

Hold up a moment..

My very quick digest from skim-reading that:

1) Some recent franchise films have altered the demographic of the previously presumed cast

2) This was received very badly by a minority of the public

3) Who acted like complete and utter cunts and started whipping up controversy and abusing all people involved BUT!! (and this is the important revelation here)

4) This was all deliberate by the movie studios, so they're the bad people, not those covered in #3 as we'd all assumed (based on the self-incriminating evidence they love to push out under their own names)

I can only hope some sort of class-action suit is launched to provide restitution to all those innocents who've damaged their throats after being forced to spew so much bile against their will for so long.

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That’s not what I read…

1. Some recent franchises have altered the demographic of the cast

2. Some portion of the public doesn’t like the film, for various reasons

3. Accuse the haters of an -ism, push the narrative hard, and build the controversy through it

4. Find the worst behaving people in the new controversy, and give them a speakerphone. Construct a toxic controversy

5. Accuse everyone with a negative opinion of being part of the toxic controversy, and shut them down

This was my take as well.

The amplification of toxicity is notable across forums, and yes it does impact and shutdown valid discussions.

It’s an age old strategy to amplify the worst aspects of your opposition.

I wouldn't take this as a reason to develop sympathy for the cunts - but I do think it's worthwhile to look at things critically and understand if you're being manipulated, because marketing strategies like these are also designed to get buy in from your anger at the people that are pissed off.

I'm not sure if any of these decisions in film are actually cynical in this way or if they've all been genuine - but outside of film political outrage-marketing has been used again and again in the past decade.

If you get whipped up into a rage at the other people whipped up into a rage by X corporation pushing Y hot-button agenda (eg Gillette and their foray into gender politics) it's important to remember that you're both getting played by a cynical capitalist machine.

X company doesn't actually care about about Y issue - but they care a lot about the publicity and new loyal fans they can generate by cynically whipping up outrage.

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