‘Jedi’ director deletes old tweets.
Yet another “Star Wars” celebrity is taking a blaster to much of his social-media past.
Rian Johnson has deleted all his tweets prior to Jan. 25 of this year. The action is particularly notable because the writerdirector became an especially engaged user on Twitter leading up to the release of his popular and polarizing film “The Last Jedi” last December.
Johnson, whohas nearly amillion Twitter followers, now has fewer than 1,200 visible tweets— none from prior to this year, despite nearly a decade on Twitter.
Some comic-book and pop- culture sites began reporting this week that Johnson had deleted more than 20,000 tweets. In response to these reports Wednesday evening, Johnson tweeted that he took the action himself under “no official directive at all.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever tweeted anything that bad,” Johnson tweeted. “But it’s nine years of stuff written largely off the cuff as ephemera, if trolls scrutinizing it for ammunition is the new normal, this seems like a ‘why not?’ move.”
Johnson is guiding Disney/Lucasfilm’s next “Star Wars” trilogy. His action on Twitter comes in the wake of Disney’s firing Friday of writer- director James Gunn from “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.” Disney representatives did not immediately return a request for comment.
Johnson did not specify what kind of “trolls” he believes are defining the new normal. But the campaign against Gunn went viral last week when sparked by conservative online figures, who helped resurface Gunn’s tweets from as far back as a decade ago — some of which he had described as shock-provocative “jokes” about rape and pedophilia. Disney, in firing Gunn, called the tweets “indefensible” and not in line with the studio’s values.
In recent days, rightwing critics also launched a campaign resurfacing decade- old video content once published by “Rick and Morty” co-creator Dan Harmon. Harmon apologized and deleted his Twitter account; his employer, Adult Swim, noted his apology in choosing not to penalize or fire him.
Such campaigns have arisen in the wake of Disney’s firing of comedian Roseanne Barr from her ABC show in May, after she tweeted racist remarks about former Obama administration adviser Valerie Jarrett.