Alt-right group takes responsibility for low 'The Last Jedi' audience scores

Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a rather unique entry in the series, much like how The Empire Strikes Back was in its day. The film relied heavily on subverting expectations built up in The Force Awakens, starting with Luke's reclusive lifestyle, having cut himself off from the Force for the loss of his fledgeling Jedi order, to the way the Snoke/Rey/Kylo connection was handled by Rian.

However, it appears not everyone was happy with the film. Despite Rotten Tomatoes registering a staggering 92% score from critics, the audience score tells a completely different story: The approval rating is a paltry 53% from over 136,000 ratings. The sharp contrast between the scores reflected on other popular review aggregator sites like Metacritic brought up talk that bots were being used to manipulate the audience score for the film, and now it seems one party has indeed come up to take responsibility for the attack.

A moderator of a Facebook group obstinately named "Down With Disney's Treatment of Franchises and its Fanboys" reached out to HuffingtonPost  to 'claim credit' for the assault on the film's Rotten Tomatoes page, saying that he and his 'technically literate' friend were responsible for deploying an army of bots against the film's RT page to bring the audience score down much like how the Rebellion deployed its small army to try and take down the Death Star in 'A New Hope'.

The moderator in question, who refused to identify himself, reasoned his move on two primary grounds: Primarily, the removal of the so-called Expanded Universe, comprising a number of books, comics and games, among other things, that build upon Star Wars following the end of Return of the Jedi, and the allegations of inserting feminist propaganda into the films and putting characters like Poe Dameron and Luke Skywalker into danger of 'being turned gay'.

As is typically associated with alt-right people in the bowels of the internet, the moderator also went on to say that “Regarding female heroes: Did you not see everything that came out of Ghostbusters? That is why. I’m sick and tired of men being portrayed as idiots. There was a time we ruled society and I want to see that again. That is why I voted for Donald Trump.”

The inordinate amount of hate The Last Jedi gets notwithstanding, one person actually opened up a petition on Change.org (https://www.change.org/p/the-walt-disney-company-have-disney-strike-star-wars-episode-viii-from-the-official-canon), with the goal to have Disney "scrap" The Last Jedi from the new Star Wars canon.

The petition has over 51,000 signatures as of this writing, but the creator appears to have stepped away from his own creation because of threats.