The casting of the film’s four stars - Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones - was declared to be a “SJW” capitulation to “political correctness,” and Jones, the only woman of color in the cast, became the target of a particularly hateful online assault led by self-styled provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos (who was eventually banned from Twitter as a result). The Ghostbusters backlash was also perpetuated largely by a violently vocal minority and took some of the same shape as Gamergate, particularly in the ways it targeted women and people of color. In some ways, the Ghostbusters backlash was a sequel to Gamergate, which began with the bizarre and misogynistic harassment of a number of women in the gaming world, grew into a full-blown online troll onslaught, and eventually became a blueprint for recruiting mostly young men to the burgeoning alt-right. Columbia Pictures The attacks on Ghostbusters and subsequent movies set a template for a different, degraded kind of criticism But in retrospect, the Great Ghostbusters Apocalypse of spring 2016 was a harbinger of things to come, and a window into the ways the internet can fan the flames and provide a platform for the toxic corners of pop culture fandoms to act on their worst impulses. That skepticism, a familiar response to most announcements of reboots and remakes, was justifiable one clear trend of the 2010s was the never-ending resurrection of pop culture properties we thought were long over, mostly with no good reason beyond “nostalgia sells.” But more generalized skepticism over the idea of an all-woman Ghostbusters was quickly eclipsed by a bizarrely overblown backlash, months before the film even came out. Was there really enough life in Ghostbusters to sustain a whole new reboot? That’s one reason why the mid-decade announcement of a new “gender-swapped” version of Ghostbusters - which, like the 1984 original, would star four performers, some familiar faces from Saturday Night Live, but this time they’d be women - was met with skepticism. But without the nostalgia factor in play, each successive Ghostbusters film or property, at best, feels like a funny idea for a sketch stretched out to feature-length, then buoyed by its performers’ name recognition and irresistible comic performances and, eventually, nostalgia. It’s going to take a special sort of tech solution to iterate the heart.None of the Ghostbusters movies are particularly good, though you might argue the original was great, in the way that cult comedy classics from the 1980s often take on a life of their own with people who grew up wearing out their VHS copies or rewatching them on TV whenever they aired. We realize we still have a lot of work in front of us before Twitter is where it should be on how we handle these issues.” “We rely on people to report this type of behavior to us but we are continuing to invest heavily in improving our tools and enforcement systems to prevent this kind of abuse. “This type of abusive behavior is not permitted on Twitter, and we’ve taken action on many of the accounts reported to us by both Leslie and others,” it said. When people feel that they’ve been given permission to speak, they sometimes say terrible things.Ī Twitter spokesperson issued a statement to Buzzfeed. (If you haven’t already, please read technologist Anil Dash’s “ Online Abuse Playbook,” one of the best analyses out there.) But just like we’re seeing with Airbnb, it’s more than just a platform design issue. This is yet another moment when we all can and should insist that social platforms to do more to protect the people who use them from unwarranted abuse. Project Runway alum Christian Siriano put his hand up and later tweeted, “It shouldn’t be exceptional to work with brilliant people just because they’re not sample size. When no designer stepped forward to dress her for the film’s premiere apparently because she wasn’t model thin, she was forced to ask fans on Twitter for help. But Jones, who is a wildly talented comic voice, was singled out from the beginning for special indignities.
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