Rotten Tomatoes 'Black Panther' Hackers Banned from Facebook

The alt-right group with plans to deliberately sabotage Black Panther’s upcoming release has officially been dismantled by the mighty power of Facebook, which deemed the group’s mission an instance of harassment after users reported the page.

The Facebook community called “Down With Disney’s Treatment of Franchises and its Fanboys,” was officially banned on Thursday, seemingly along with its leader, who previously expressed to Inverse excitement at all of the media coverage his efforts were getting.

The group had created an “Event” on Wednesday advertising plans to deploy bots that would artificially diminish Black Panther’s Rotten Tomatoes score, but it was also a way to rally alt-right DC fans to add their own reviews while also delivering targeted spoilers to “Marvel fanboys.” After a surge of interest in the event numbering in the thousands, the user made further plans to sabotage other upcoming Disney films, namely Avengers: Infinity War and the Han Solo movie.

Their excitement was ultimately unfounded, it would seem, because all that attention also led to a massive number of Facebook users reporting what many outlets have called a “hate group.”

Now, trying to go to this community page yields absolutely nothing:

In December, the same user managing this group claimed responsibility for the low Rotten Tomatoes audience score for Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

When asked about motives at the time, the user told Inverse, “My agenda is to fight for a beautiful world that has been lost to asshole SJWs. I helped also by voting for Trump. He gets what I want.” It becomes clear that the group was motivated by some kind of hate, especially when their primary issue with the film was its supposed “feminist agenda.”

In a statement to TheWrap made Thursday, Rotten Tomatoes made it clear that they don’t condone this group’s mission even if they do respect diversity of opinions:

“While we respect our fans’ diverse opinions, we do not condone hate speech. Our team of security, network and social experts continue to closely monitor our platforms and any users who engage in such activities will be blocked from our site and their comments removed as quickly as possible.”

Only one final thought seems appropriate here: Long live the king.

Black Panther will be released in theaters February 16, 2018 whether or not the trolls want it to.