South Park is waging an all-out war on “Woke Disney” and winning, according to fans of the show whose Facebook feeds are full of African children building fruit statues of Jesus on their birthdays.
Eighteen months ago, South Park gave conservative culture warriors their favorite rallying cry of “Put a chick in it and make her gay!” with their streaming special South Park: Joining the Panderverse. In classic “both sides are equally stupid” South Park fashion, Trey Parker and Matt Stone used the special to skewer the perceived shift toward “wokeness” within the Disney movie empire as well as the backlash from right-wing, Cartman-esque keyboard warriors. But, as is so often the case in the South Park fandom, millions of viewers chose to focus exclusively on the former cultural critique, deciding that South Park was officially on the side of grown men who spend six hours a day tweeting obscenities at Black actors cast in kids’ movies.
The emergence of Joining the Panderverse as an unintentional conservative call-to-action coincided with the rise of A.I.-powered, misinformational clickbait content. This created an ecosystem of computer-generated slop videos on YouTube that generate hundreds of thousands of views per post from anti-woke South Park fans who, in past ages of the internet, would have sent their life savings to the many displaced princes of Nigeria.
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With their fabricated slop videos, these A.I. algorithm-chasers are specifically targeting Rachel Zegler, star of the snowflake-triggering live-action Disney film Snow White, which was released earlier this year amidst massive outrage from conservative cultural critics over Zegler’s non-snowy-white skin color. According to these YouTube accounts and the South Park fans who generate massive engagement for them, Zegler and South Park have been regularly trading teary tirades and legal action for the last year.
Here are just a few of the insane thumbnails that South Park fans continue to click on:
So, according to the many lengthy, monetized and entirely misinformative YouTube videos currently racking up six-to-seven-figure view counts, South Park dissed Zegler and her performance in Snow White, the actress then had multiple crying meltdowns, sued Parker and Stone for $100 million, lost the suit and then cried again when the South Park creators told her proudly, “We don’t give a f*ck!”
Since it apparently needs clarifying, literally none of that has ever happened. South Park never directly satirized the Snow White remake or Zegler personally, and the online right’s least favorite movie star has never publicly commented on any South Park episode, joke or portrayal, including the “Woke Disney” takedown in South Park: Joining the Panderverse.
Nevertheless, the deluge of A.I.-edited thumbnails and 20-minute long, A.I.-edited YouTube compilations about this completely fabricated controversy has convinced the South Park following that there’s a secret South Park episode attacking the Snow White actress. “She turned herself into a joke. South Park just illustrated how ludicrous she is. She trashed her career,” a top commenter under one such YouTube video wrote.
Another added, “Respect to Comedy Central for letting the South Park crew do their thing throughout the years. Many network executives would’ve caved in to outside pressure a long time ago.”
Even many fans in the South Park subreddit have fallen prey to the clickbait campaign, such as one user in the recently posted thread, “Which Episode/Movie Has the Snow White Stuff in It That People Are Raging About?” Despite how South Park fans in the thread failed to find any mention of Zegler or the Snow White remake in the show’s lengthy catalog, the Redditors roundly concluded that the only reason they never heard about South Park’s attacks on Zegler before slop accounts started posting about it is because Parker and Stone devoted an upcoming episode from Season 27 to joining the far-right Snow White dogpile.
“Put a chick in it and make her gay,” one fan predictably replied.
While South Park is far from the only series to fall victim to A.I.-powered clickbait and YouTube monetized misinformation, the shocking popularity and profitability of this slop content exposes an ugly truth about much of the show’s following: Millions of South Park fans don’t understand even the most surface-level satire, and they’ll believe anything told to them so long as it’s typed out in simple words next to a screenshot of Eric Cartman.
Or, at least, next to a crying A.I. abomination in the shape of a famous brown person.
Content shared from www.cracked.com.