On Sunday night, a movement to boycott Star Wars: The Force Awakens surfaced online. The hashtag #BoycottStarWarsVII soon began picking up steam, and eventually became a top trending topic the next day. The ostensible reason for its popularity—noted by every website that reports on these type of things and many who do not—was a perceived groundswell of anti-diversity backlash directed at the cast of the film, which, in reality, happens to include multiple non-white actors. You can probably guess what happened next. Soon, the topic was flooded by thousands of outraged reactionaries who promptly signal-boosted the sentiment into the stratosphere, egged on, in no small part, by blog posts, like this one from The Mary Sue, who framed this as a Serious Issue You Need To Know About Today. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, these aren't the droids they were looking for.

The hashtag, spearheaded by a handful of trolls, was specifically designed, not because there was ever any intention to organize a Star Wars boycott—good luck getting anyone who isn't already going to see it to change their mind—but to troll for the instant gratification of trolling.

"Racists threaten to boycott 'Star Wars VII' because it promotes 'white genocide,' apparently," headlined Salon, in a post that rounded up the same handful of tweets from a handful of users that most other sites used.

"Laughably enough, the racist, misogynistic, and anti-Semitic crusaders of the #BoycottStarWarsVII movement completely miss the point of every lesson ever built into the Star Wars franchise," wrote The Daily Beast, which, like many other sites, attempted to point out that the franchise has indeed featured numerous actors of color over the years. Sadly, many of the people writing these posts seem to have completely missed the point of every lesson ever built into the Internet: Don't feed the trolls. For almost the entirety of the hashtag's run, it was dominated by people commenting on how terrible it was, with very little of the noise coming from actual racists, the thing we were supposed to be upset about in the first place. That's because there weren't that many of them involved.

Not long thereafter, users on the message board 4chan, noted for these type of petulant tactics, began taking credit for the con. "WE DID IT" wrote one, linking to the Salon article. Others gleefully echoed the sentiment on Twitter. "We did it Again #4chan should win a Nobel Peace Prize ! We made a racial issue out of thin air!!" posted one.

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#BoycottStarWarsVII:

40% counter-trolls

30% blog post links

15% the aggrieved

10% content farm spam links

4% trolls

1% sincere — luke (@lukeoneil47) October 19, 2015

Many writing on the topic today have noted, as the suspicion that it was a prank has dawned on them 24 hours later, that it doesn't matter if it was a sincerely launched movement, because so many people glommed onto it, lobbing their own hateful rhetoric into the fray. And yes, while there are very many bigots out there who would rather not see their beloved fantasy franchise sullied by non-white actors, framing it within the context of this obvious troll job makes everyone involved look bad at their jobs. Some have said there's no difference between outright racism and "ironic racism" tossed around like a grenade just to see how people will react. That may or may not be true, but it's incumbent upon a media professional to be able to distinguish between the two. If you're working in the media today and you can't spot a troll from five clicks away, you should hand over your password to the CMS.

No reporter would file a story based solely on the deranged ramblings of an anonymous, obviously disturbed person screaming on the street, so why do so many of us continue to do this when it comes to isolated pockets of Twitter users? Group of Assholes Says Something Stupid just isn't a newsworthy story. But, when you can affix that angle to a mention of Star Wars, then it makes more sense. People are hungry for any sort of news about the film, and when you add in the element of outrage, it's an orgy of clicks for everyone, including the inevitable denouement when we get to write shaming anti-reaction-reaction pieces like this one.

So what happened? There are two possible scenarios here. Either the media has become so anxious to give a megaphone to every asinine cluster of bigots for the sake of page views, or they just don't care whether the vitriol is authentic or not. Makes you wonder who the more successful trolls are here, the ones instigating the hate in the first place, or the bloggers who amplify it.

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