Black Panthermade its triumphant debut in theaters last weekend, breaking records and earning some major box office money. Praise for the movie has been almost universal, but there have been some hiccups. First, there was thetroll group on social mediathat was determined to giveBlack Pantherbad reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and other review sites because the movie is associated with Disney. However, fake reports of racially motivated attacks were a lot more serious and spread like wild fire on social media over the weekend.
Black Pantheris the first Marvel Cinematic Universe project to be led by apredominately black castand in these politically divisive times, a certain portion of the population can’t seem to wrap their heads around it. In order to offset the praise that the movie had been getting, Twitter users began posting pictures of bloody Caucasian faces, stating that they had been beat up for attendingBlack Panther. The pictures all contained stories about how these fake incidents took place, as well as where they took place. Police departments in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Texas have had zero reports of racially charged violence, or any violence for that matter, at any screenings ofBlack Panther.
A lot of the fake incident posts on Twitter were done by users withalt-rightnames and profiles, some of which are inappropriate to print here. As a result, Twitter has taken the accounts down and suspended many of them. One post reads.
“I was so excited to see #BlackPanther and a young black man at the theater shouted you in the wrong place, cracker! And proceeded to bloody my face. It hurts so bad I can’t take it!”
In typical troll fashion, the images were able to be Google reverse searched and turned out to be old pictures found on Imgur from totally unrelated events. In an awesome set of events, clever trolls began to troll the trolls, providing pictures of well-known celebrities in movie roles all beat up.
Pictures of Sylvester Stallone’s (who is alive and well, btw)Rockywere posted, with a caption talking about him getting beat up at aBlack Pantherscreening along with Uma Thurman’s Mia character fromPulp Fictionshown off with a bloody nose. It’s always fun to see something that was started off with hate end in humor from good trolls, fighting the good fight. Though it’s unfortunate that thesefake newsreports were made up in the first place.
Twitter recently deleted thousands of accounts that were proven to be Russian bots by Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 election. It has not been proven if any of these accounts that posted the fakeBlack Pantherviolent stories were Russian bots, but it seems highly probable since these bots have also been caught posting about gun control in America from both sides to further divide the country and have even gone as far as to coordinate rallies. Whatever the case may be, there were zeroviolent incidentsat any screenings ofBlack Pantherand the reports are fake news, as the president would say. you may check out some of the humorous comebacks below from the good trolls, courtesy ofTrapafasa’s Twitteraccount.
