@RTSnyderCut Twitter Events Statement

Firstly, let us take this opportunity to thank you all for the welcome back to the timeline. We are all grateful for your words of kindness and support. We appreciate each and every one of you. We have also been very impressed with the work you all have done in helping keep morale high in the movement, especially the latest twitter event hosted by Alessandro and Jessex, which amassed over 60k tweets with the movement’s hashtag… #ReleaseTheSnyderCut!

This brings us nicely to the reason for this statement, which we both understand and accept that not everyone will be in agreement. We should start out by being explicitly clear that this is in no way us telling anyone what you can and cannot do. Everyone is, and always has been free to support Zack in any way they please.

The decision we have collectively made, is that going forward, the @RTSnyderCut account will actively promote and support no more than 3 pre-planned twitter “trending” events per year, one of which will of course be on November 17th. As far as the other 2 go we are happy to have an open and clear dialogue with the community and perhaps put a few dates to a poll, so that you can be active participants in the decision making process. This community is full of really passionate people like ourselves, who want to contribute to the cause every moment they can. We couldn’t have had the success we have had so far without it.

 

 

However, we believe that with a combination of a variety of different, unique online and offline events – that don’t rely on merely getting a “trend” – we can be more effective with our goal. Events such as the plane banners, the Times Square and soccer game billboards, the ZSJL fan poster competition, the arts festival charity drive, the meme competition, the letters to WB executives, organized phone call campaigns, the charity retweet challenge to Subway, and all our attendances at comic cons all over the world, is an indication of what we can achieve, without becoming stale. Here are the specific reasons we will be limiting our active participatory support for these twitter “trend” events:

 

• Maintaining Energy and Sustainability: Since last November we have had many members of the community contact us expressing frustration. People have stressed that while they are burnt out and don’t have the energy to participate in day long twitter events every other week, they feel peer-pressured into doing so (especially if it comes from our central hub). Oftentimes these events happen at weekends or on holidays, which often leaves members of our community choosing between their friends and families, and supporting a cause which they believe in. We accept that not everyone will feel this way, but we also have to accept that some people do. We also have an enormous contingent of more casual supporters and others who are sympathetic to our cause. They are more likely to participate if they feel like their contribution matters. If they feel like they event in which they participate is special. If they feel like they are making a difference. Having such a large volume of events reduces their participating to almost zero. This is shown by their active participation on November 17th compared to the many events since. We need them! We are all in this together, so it is important that we find a happy medium.

 

• Putting the Unity of the Movement First: We have noticed that an element of tribalism is coming into play. One of these elements is a stigma associated with what hashtag to use, with demands of why one hashtag is used and not another. We have also noticed that this leads to events being weaponized; who is tweeting during one person’s event vs who is tweeting during another’s. This has two effects. We end up with more events, and each of these events end up being significantly smaller than what they could otherwise be. Burnout and discord instead of strength and unity.

 

• Increasing Effectiveness of Online Events: There appears to be a misunderstanding from some as to what “trending” means. On twitter, a “trend” relates to the rate of tweets and not the number of tweets. What does this mean? It means that a hashtag can trend with as little as 2,000 tweets if those tweets are made in a short period of time, and another hashtag with 50,000 tweets over a longer period might not trend at all. Twitter’s “Trending For You” feature often shows our hashtag as “trending”, however the outside world beyond our community bubble will never actually see it trending. What made November 17th successful, was our ability to trend so that those outside of our community, who don’t tweet about the Snyder cut as frequently as we do, could see our hashtag. You will recall in that week running up to November 17th that we also did a series of 1 hour events per day. In some of those 1 hour periods we amassed less than 40 or 50k tweets. But because all of those tweets were squashed in a 1 hour period, the tweet rate was high! We trended worldwide on each of those occasions, and not just in the “Trending For You” section. We should want to be more than an echo chamber.

 

We have to ask ourselves the very important questions of why we are here and why we do these events. Are they for fun? Or are they to try and convince WB to #ReleaseTheSnyderCut? If our goal is to make WB know about us, they have to see us. If we want them to see us, our trends have to be seen. If we are to be seen, we have to work as one cohesive unit. No tribes. No guilt trips. No burnout. Think of your favorite food. Now imagine being forced to eat it every single day for a month. The next day, are you going to want to eat it again? We didn’t trend worldwide last year and make newspaper headlines because we did a trending event every few weeks. We made headlines because the few trends we did partake in were huge. To put that into context, there have already been more trend events in the first 4 months of this year than in the first 11 months of last year, and none of them have yet to make headlines in the mainstream, non-comic book movie related media. This isn’t to belittle the efforts and passion of the community, but sometimes we need to take a step back and reassess what we want to achieve. Are we here for fun? Or are we here to win? We believe that this community is a community of winners.

Already, in the first few days of our return, some fans have proposed some EXCELLENT event ideas for the community to get behind, that we are extremely excited to support. Without going into spoiler territory, these fan owned events include an AFSP charity event with an element of photography, an idea to increase our YouTube presence by hosting round-table events with a rotating cast of community members, an intriguing artistic event, and a Snyder Cut challenge! All are currently in their infancy, but with the passion and help of this community we have no doubts that they will all be successful. And while we did mention that we will limit our “pre-planned” twitter events to 3 per year, that doesn’t mean we won’t actively partake in impromptu twitter trend attempts if the occasion calls for it (for example if there’s a major piece of news that we should capitalize on). We will also use twitter to increase our exposure on a daily basis by continuing to remind Warner Bros related accounts that we want them to #ReleaseTheSnyderCut, a highly effective tactic that has shown results. We made mainstream media headlines with this tactic when Ann Sarnoff was announced as WB CEO last year! So there is plenty to keep us participating towards the active pursuit of our goal.

Finally, we are aware that two events for the coming weeks have been planned by fans before this announcement was provided. Therefore, we believe it is only fair that as a result we partake in some form of promotion if requested by the event organizers in the run-up, though we will limit our active participation to the events agreed upon by the community. As mentioned earlier, this doesn’t mean we are trying to stop people from doing more twitter events in the future. Everyone is of course free to support Zack however they please. We are just providing some clarity on why we will limit active participation in these areas in the future, and we believe if you trust us on this, we can eventually make our hashtag hit 1 million and trend worldwide!

 

The RTSnyderCut admin team.

 

#ReleaseTheSnyderCut