Zack Snyder Fans Allegedly Used Thousands Of Bots To Secure Oscars Win
This year's Academy Awards were pretty controversial, and not just because Will Smith slapped Chris Rock across the face. Two of the categories were left to fan votes on Twitter to determine the winners. Social media users were able to vote to determine the winners of the Fan Favorite and Cheer Moment categories. Both wins went to Zack Snyder movies, and now it seems the loyal fans of the movie maker might have used underhanded tactics to make that happen.
A new report from TheWrap has pointed to potentially thousands of bots casting votes for Snyder movies in both categories. The report cites findings from an analytics tool called Tweetbinder which discovered most of the votes cast for Synder's winning movies in both categories were done so by autonomous web programs. University professor David Kirsch says in the report that the votes don't look like they were cast by human users.
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The plot thickens. The report also highlights when exactly large chunks of the votes for Army of the Dead, which won the Fan Favourite vote, and Justice League, which topped the Cheer Moment poll, were made. 25,000 votes were cast on February 27, 2022, which is a huge uptick on the daily average that tended to fall anywhere between 4000 and 15000 votes.
A tabulation company called Telescope was used by The Academy in order to prevent something like this from happening. Telescope's work should prevent the same Twitter user from voting more than 20 times, and not allow Twitter accounts less than 24 hours old to cast any votes. However, the polls ran for far longer than 24 hours, and even at 20 votes each, if enough bot accounts were created, their votes could have drastically altered who won and lost
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