Social Outrage Against Edgy Content Continues With Twitter-Bot Attacks Against Adult Swim That Everyone Bought Into
It’s been less than a month since the Black Lives Matter movement went from being a cause looking for equal rights for black Americans to that of a full-on purge of the entertainment industry of anything that might be remotely be deemed as racist, even if not. Series like Family Guy and The Simpsons have seen casualties in the form of white voice actors stepping down from voicing PoC characters which has caused the likes of known an unknown actors alike throwing their names in the ring to be the new fill-ins. As of this writing, Wendell Pierce hasn’t been contacted by the producers of Family Guy to be the new voice of “Cleveland Brown” after Mike Henry stepped down though with panels for both aforementioned series happening this week for Comic-Con @ Home, hopefully we’ll get more information to provide.
In any event, a new social outrage took place over the weekend with a bot (that appears to already be deleted by Twitter) claiming to be a woman offended by the content being aired on Adult Swim that she said was “geared towards children”. Further stoking the flames were conservative pundits rallying against various producers of Adult Swim programming for championing the content they may or may not be developing. Plenty more bots joined into the conversation which, of course, gives the appearance of a viral outrage that leads to actual users chiming in with their thoughts.
The result? Adult Swim had some fun at the internet’s response with a bunch of ids telling viewers that not only is the content not suitable for children but, and this is ever more pertinent right now, if you don’t like what you are watching…turn the fucking channel.
That said, it is startling to see how susceptible real users and even verified accounts are to bot attacks. A simple look-see at some of these profiles clearly show a bot account, often the culprits of taking social platforms like #metoo and #blm and using them as weapons of hate as opposed to being causes for good.
