Retracing the Twitter Storm
This is the Way Fans Persecuted Gina Carano
Gina Carano is not the author of the post that led to her firing. You wouldn’t know it if you go by what’s online, or that she lauded inclusion among the fanbase.
Stories were cloned wholesale supported only by trending Twitter interpretation & superimposed intentions by activist-fans.
Beyond mob persecution, this also is a story of journalistic failing:
Tweet Zero: it begins just before 8am EST with a slur from a 30 year old female Star Wars fan.
Three observations about the February 10th Instagram screenshot appearing on Twitter:
1. The previous poster of the content is ‘Warrior Priest Gym Podcast’ on Instagram.
He says he is not the original author either.
2. Carano’s ‘repost’ is at the end of 29 story day cue.
(On IG viewers engage with story content by actively clicking through each post.)
3. The original IG poster also embedded a music icon to an anti-Nazi music track.
Twitter user ceo of bottom han solo is a New York City area illustrator & the author of Tweet Zero. Ceo’s Twitter profile is dedicated to Star Wars fandom, her artwork, & shock posts regarding acts of dominance with Han Solo. She openly self-identifies as “neurodivergent” & ADHD.
After her first post, Ceo posts to an older thread (replying to herself), using #FireGinaCarano, and thus potentially activating those connected with the previous January 30th effort.
After then asking others ‘to get it trending,’ 31 people in all repost the hashtag to fire Carano. The 124 who commented on Jan 30th are also potentially connected to the updated effort.
Another Superfan, dedicated to idolizing Pedro Pascal (& antagonizing Carano), makes a post mentioning the Holocaust & Republicans. Janet herself has been out of work since COVID hit and is a student who has been venting about finals.
Janet’s post is retweeted en masse & gets 10k likes, setting the table for the dominate talking point: That the meme can only be interpreted as an offensive comparison between Republicans & the Holocaust, per Janet, though neither Holocaust nor Republicans are mentioned in the original.
This extrapolated interpretation will echo through the twittersphere, into scathing editorial posts by Vox & the Daily Beast, and then legacy publications like Newsweek and Rolling Stone.
Outlets continue picking up the story, cloning it wholesale with Janet’s interpretation.
Janet’s noontime tweet, by afternoon is parroted by a film fan-site with over 170K followers. The site adds ‘disgusting’ to the narrative.
That post also gets over 10k likes and by now the hashtag is trending...
Yet, how many of the thousands have read the original post at all?
How many are just tapping into a mutual rage point online?
How many fail to see the irony, as a wave of persecution keeps building.
The icon of the embedded track appears below the child with a club in the historical image.
A handful of accounts end up with outrage-based posts hitting 10K likes. The online labeling of ‘anti-Semitic’ starts to be thrown in as well as ‘racist’, branding the targeted figure.
Journalists from opposing political poles, Ben Shapiro & Bari Weiss, point out in the aftermath that the original content is not anti-Semitic, though they both believe as a rule it’s best to avoid comparisons to Nazi Germany. They also reference a double standard as co-star Pedro Pascal made the same ‘overwrought’ error with posts, but for the political left.
The trending hashtag is used by those defending Carano online as well, unwittingly adding to the algorithmic inertia of #fireGinaCarano.
Before day’s end, Disney decrees of the actress, ‘Her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.’
A heavily engaged post with over 10K likes from a Game of Thrones / Star Wars fan makes the most notable case for insensitivity calling the original post ‘vile and unnecessary.’ The fan takes issue with the meme’s inquiry (posed as a question) if a society hating a class of people for their otherness is any different than their political beliefs. Twitter user Sarah emphatically maintains they are not the same. That tweet gets over 12k likes.
Sarah is a performing arts student who credits the original poster of Tweet Zero (Ceo) as having supplied the 1st screenshot earlier that morning which she then cloned.
Sarah later will change her Twitter profile picture and post about Black Panther star Letitia Wright, who faced a similar mob attack last year after the Guyanese-British actress shared a video discussing vaccines.
Disguising the Target’s name while generating animus is a technique used by cancel fanatics allowing the build-up over time to go undetected through a Twitter search.
Ceo herself was on the receiving end of criticism for racially charged comments she made about the Star Wars character Finn last year & had to apologize to the twitter community in January.
I contacted her and pointed out her controversial tweet was still up & asked for comment. She wrote un-ironically of the online community, ‘They literally have people spew racist shit every day & they are obsessed with a 3 year old tweet.’ Her tweet is now deleted.
Note that Ceo does not get the thousands of likes the handful of others do, even with her original tweet.
One marginal Twitter account with over 1,000 tweets named Fire Gina Corona bot has been dedicated specifically to retweeting posts calling for Gina Carano to be fired. The account bio reads, “I am here to keep receipts on her internet behavior.”
Some fans attract engagement by calling Carano a white supremacist, though this too is unsupported. The tweet attracts engagement nevertheless and is parroted throughout the day.
Richard, an author & creative writing teacher, also joins the 10k club with his assessment.
Similar to online mob escalations targeting journalists witnessed in 2020, it starts by calling somebody “alt right” who stands in the way or perceived as having voted for Trump. Then they are a white supremacist. By the next day, they are a Nazi.
The fan-activists started their push in September, after the hashtag was first used on Twitter by a self identifying “Social justice advocate” Giovanna who admits to never having seen The Mandalorian.
The initial use of the hashtag targeted Carano as a Trump supporter. Carano’s political leanings, along with posts critical of mask mandates & business closures, are continuously cited by the mob as grounds for firing.
The initial attention on Carano started when she made a joke in her profile after twitter users demanded she list pronouns. She wrote “boop / bop / beep” and was labeled trans-phobic.
A tweet by Shitty Star Wars Posts implies Carano made the joke after she spoke with her co-star Pascal. The screenshots contradict this- but it becomes a Twitter truth anyhow.
Some fan-activists adulate star Pedro Pascal but campaign against Carano, & Rosario Dawson (a Bernie supporter) who nevertheless by this mob is deemed problematic for trans-advocacy.
Like ceo of bottom han solo, who authored Tweet Zero, Janet has priors.
3 days before the pile-on, Janet tweeted a call to fire Carano, a recurring topic for her new, two month old profile that has tweeted over 4,000 times about Star Wars in just two months.
As others do in a persecution trend, the fan captures posts Carano merely ‘Liked.’ Janet alludes to “Baby Yoda'' choking Carano. The post also condemns her support for police officers.
Leading up to the February 10th controversy, Carano’s political affiliation had been continuously cited by the micro-movement.
Analysis:
In the rush to jump onto the wave of an online trend, media publications fail to vet the history, bias & vitriolic ecosystem generating the controversy. They arguably end up promoting blatantly bad behavior. That the engagement is also addictive for participants has been well documented.
After footage shot for Unblocked Podcast during riots was appropriated by the web tabloid Raw Story with no communication effort, Publisher Roxanne Cooper wrote of the ethical lapse,
”We do about 80-100 stories a day, and publish about 20 hours a day.”
To what end? It’s shocking how companies appear to hedge. How many of those stories are independently researched or fact checked by traditional journalistic standards & ethics? By this workflow there’s no time to consider the Target’s side.
Thus a business model dependent on trending engagement & embracing bias, has publications running with whatever gossip yields the most shares. The unseen vulnerability is that, whether we are talking elections, political activism or fandom- bad faith chaos actors can take the day.
They protect their own & in the end, the major players celebrate and congratulate each other.
“We did it Joe,” the 30 year old author of Tweet Zero echoes Sarah's sentiment in a TikTok.
(The joke was lip synching to the audio of Kamala Harris famously telling Biden over the phone they had won the election.)
Those “winning” have asserted online this is just “accountability” since November, but are they being held to the same standards? Are they coming into the fray with honorable intentions & solid methodology? Or do they take advantage of the ethical runaway train that is online media?
If we don’t slow down and ask these questions, we are not just passively giving in to misinformation, we are condemning those willing to stand up to the fever of persecution.
We are caving to emotional demands.
The Twitter to tabloid rage pipeline works for other subcultures too, not just those who would sway LucasFilm to have it their way: From QAnon to Antifascists to Stop the Steal to Extremists.
Yes, the contested post was heavy handed. And Disney has the right to terminate at-will hires.
Still, evidence has not come forth that Carano in any way emitted even an iota of the vitriol that has been projected onto her by the persecution mob.
Carano is also disparaged for penning a post advocating that voter fraud be examined.
Though not perhaps what the offended imagine she imagines, 35 voter fraud cases are being prosecuted currently in Georgia.
It might also surprise those reacting politically to the post to know ‘normie’ conservatives were, in fact, beaten in the streets on November 14th in Washington D.C. and in California on both October 17th and December 5th.
And what are we now saying about sharing ideas in the public square for open debate?
If I post an article or a meme, am I responsible for every word, every thought or interpretation?
What about every other post that author has written? Does intent mean nothing?
If no, where will persecution by free association end?
For the triumphant, it may be only just beginning:
Note: Though identities were uncovered behind twitter accounts, names of the anonymous have been withheld so as to not add more targets to the cult of persecution and its proliferation continuing even today.
This report was commissioned by Unblocked Podcast - the anti polarization podcast.
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This was the abridged version. An extended version is on the jeremy lee quinn substack