Fans blaming and attacking actors for the failure of a film has become quite common on social media. The same thing happened with Star Wars actors when Star Wars: The Last Jedi failed to impress the audiences.

Last month, Star Wars: The Last Jedi actress Kelly Marie Tran came forward to address the main reason behind her quitting social media altogether in June this year. The 29-year-old actress whose real name is Loan put her heart out in an editorial written for The New York Times in which she opened up about the online harassment that she faced after the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

Being a newcomer, Loan was subjected to the most amount of abuse in the aftermath of the film. Star Wars fans flooded her social media accounts were with racist and sexist tweets due to their dislike for her character, Rose, in the film.

Taking all this into account, Professor Bethany Lacina from The University of Rochester conducted a study on the use of derogatory, offensive, and hate language by social media users. For the study, Lacina used an algorithm developed by Cornell University to compile and examine the Tweets. She used the data to examine the types of languages used in the tweets, the amount of offensive speech used, and the different types of users who were sending out offensive tweets.

It was found that 73 percent of all tweets related to Star Wars or Star Wars: The Last Jedi were negative and more than 6 percent of those contained derogatory language. 12 percent of tweets targeted at Kelly Marie Tran or her character or Rose Tico contained abusive language and hate speech.

The study found that female fans were more likely to receive hateful language from fans- one in 280 tweets contained hate speech in comparison to one in 450 tweets for men.

You can check out Bethany Lacina’s study results in detail in The Washington Post.

Source: Washington Post H/T Heroic Hollywood