LOS ANGELES — Don't, Twitter! Getting mad about #BoycottStarWarsVII is a trap! It's a trap!

The insidious hashtag — and its vile notion that the Star Wars: The Force Awakens cast is somehow too diverse — made the social-media outrage jump to light speed on Monday. Not because it was an actual racist "movement," but because of all the angry reaction it caused online.

"All too easy," said the tiny handful of trolls who started the hashtag.

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The first tweet with the #BoycottStarWarsVII hashtag came just before 9 p.m. ET on Sunday, from a United Kingdom-based user whose handle (which we won't promote here) does not reveal that person's identity. The account-holder's initial complaint: "The new Star Wars movie (#StarWarsVII) barely has any whites in it."

One minute later, that user had another idea: "Let's get #BoycottStarWarsVII trending." Barely a moment went by when a second account, whose bio says its anonymous user is "fed up with political correctness," picked up the baton, saying things like "JJ Abram's political correctness is a code word for anti-white" and "white children deserve wholesome movies, not more PC anti-white diversity crap."

A third chimed in: "let's make #BoycottStarWarsVII trend. It's just another anti-white propaganda piece. Get the word out!"

As the racist rhetoric heated up, so did not-so-sly references to their true intentions: To get decent people riled. And it worked.

By midday Monday, #BoycottStarWarsVII was the No. 1 trending U.S. topic on Twitter, where it stayed for a few hours before finally giving way to news of a revived Gilmore Girls.

Meanwhile, over on 4Chan's "politically incorrect" /pol/ thread — where baiting "Social Justice Warriors" into outrage mode is something of a bloodsport — anonymous trolls were reveling in the reactions to their racist poking and prodding

"EVERYONE GET ON TWITTER THE ALT RIGHT IS TRIGGERING SJWS," wrote a typical user — just one in a flowing torrent of appalling celebrations over the garbage fire they'd started. "THE TEARS ARE UNREAL HAHAHAHAHAH."

Thing is, if no one had taken the bait, the topic would've died in its tracks.

Of everyone who tweeted the hashtag #BoycottStarWarsVII on Monday, 94% were merely expressing outrage over its existence, according to a statistically relevant sample examined by social media social listening and analytics firm Fizziology for Mashable. The other 6% were "racist trolls trying to get people mad," the firm told Mashable, adding that many of them also used their rants to campaign for Donald Trump.

Still, the damage was done. Enough decent people — including Star Wars: The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams — felt the need to post a response to a notion that was engineered to ... stir up responses.

"STAR WARS VII IS ANTI-WHITE!!!" "But...it's robots and aliens and spacesh—" "WHITE GENOCIDE!!!!!!" "Um..." "BLAAARGAGLEARBL!!!" — Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) October 19, 2015

The media was complicit, too, picking up on the trend early — with sensational headlines by the dozen — and reporting it as if there were an actual boycott threat behind the hashtag. "Boycott 'Star Wars VII'" Movement Launched; Movie Called "Anti-White," cried one headline; Racists threaten to boycott “Star Wars VII” because it promotes “white genocide,” apparently, read another.

In almost every one of those stories, the three trolls who started it all were cited, the worst of their spiraling race-baiting tweets embedded for display. But while a few repugnant trolls do not a "movement" make, they sure can cause a mighty explosion of outrage.

"I felt a great disturbance in the Force," a wise man once said, "as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."

In this case, that silence would've been golden right from the start.

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