Movie critical aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes has come under fire in the past year or so for seemingly doing little about organised attacks by both online trolls and programmed bots who target their ‘Audience Score’ of major movies.
Each film page on the site includes both a ‘Critical Score’ which averages out review scores from film critics, and an ‘Audience Score’ which starts out as a ‘Want To See’ score before release, and a ‘Liked It’ score after. The problem is bots and trolls target the ‘Audience Score’ for films mostly ahead and sometimes after release and skew the results – as was reportedly seen with Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Black Panther and Ghostbusters.
The latest attack has been to Captain Marvel!
The biggest change to Audience Rating System is the ‘Want to See’ score has been abandoned – meaning the ‘Audience Score’ will only consist of the ‘Liked It’ score which will begin tallying upon a film’s release.
They’re also disabling the comment function prior to a movie’s release date due to the “uptick in non-constructive input, sometimes bordering on trolling.” This means no more pre-release popularity polls or BS comments on the site… at least not ahead of opening.
Any potential tampering will now be delayed until after a film is out, and there’s no word in the posting on any new measures to patrol or control that possibility.
