How movie sites are dealing with review-bombing trolls

Last week, review site Rotten Tomatoes disabled a couple of long-standing features to fight a new kind of internet culture war. In advance of Captain Marvel’s release, it stopped letting users leave comments before a movie launches, and it removed a badge showing the percentage of people who indicated they wanted to see the film. “Unfortunately,” a staff blog post said, “we have seen an uptick in non-constructive input, sometimes bordering on trolling.”

Most online review platforms have encountered some kind of review-bombing — a term that broadly covers a coordinated effort to give a project an influx of negative ratings, based on some contentious issue that’s tangential to the project itself. Review-bombing isn’t universally condemned; in gaming, it’s been used to protest unpopular features that genuinely affect players, like draconian copy protection. But over the past couple of years, the highest-profile review-bombing campaigns have targeted blockbuster films for the sin of casting too many women and people of color. And that’s making some review sites think more carefully about how to design a troll-proof platform.

Trolls are becoming a standard risk for movie studios

In a call with The Verge, a spokesperson said Rotten Tomatoes (which is owned by ticketing platform Fandango) has faced a new level of review-bombing over the past 18 months. She said only a few films have been seriously targeted — including Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Black Panther, two big franchise installments that implicitly or explicitly critiqued racism and sexism. But trolls are becoming a standard risk for any big movie that’s considered too feminist or anti-racist, to the point that studios are actively trying to counter trolls themselves.

Rotten Tomatoes will now open comments after a film’s premiere, and it’s not changing the way users can review films — ideally, once people start watching the movie, their good-faith positive and negative reviews will eclipse the bad-faith commentary from people who haven’t seen it and don’t intend to. Rotten Tomatoes still has moderators scan for suspicious reviews and remove them after release, though, and the spokesperson says it’s mulling an equivalent to Amazon’s “verified purchase” badge, which reviewers could get if they bought tickets through Fandango.

Rotten Tomatoes weighed the benefits of a feature against its exploitability

It’s not clear how much Rotten Tomatoes loses by closing pre-release comments. The spokesperson says they provided a genuinely useful place for fans to congregate, before they were invaded by people who just want to make a film fail. But Metacritic and IMDb, two other major hubs for reviewing movies online, don’t have an equivalent system. And Letterboxd, a smaller film review community, is removing its own pre-release ratings option in the coming weeks — not because it has serious troll problems, but because it doesn’t want to develop them.

Letterboxd co-founder Matthew Buchanan says the site was built with early ratings simply to leave users more options. “When we were starting off building this thing, we were a tiny little team,” he says. At that point, the platform was so small that trolls didn’t bother exploiting its weak points. “We’ve had some [bad] ratings campaigns — for example, on the rebooted Ghostbusters film.” But he says they’ve been rare and usually swamped by genuine ratings after launch.

“I guess we sort of ignored that problem and put it in the ‘bridges that we’ll cross when we come to them’ basket,” says Buchanan. After seeing Rotten Tomatoes rework its policy, though, the team decided to pre-emptively make similar changes. Letterboxd is going to start freezing ratings until launch for films that seem likely to attract trolls, then expand that change to cover the whole platform. “I don’t think we’re under any illusion that as we grow, there isn’t going to be more of this type of behavior to deal with.”

Does review-bombing actually sabotage a movie?

Ultimately, Rotten Tomatoes argues that review-bombs don’t sabotage a movie’s odds of success. The spokesperson pointed out that Captain Marvel had garnered more Fandango ticket pre-sales than almost any other Marvel movie — in fact, it’s currently pre-sold more than any movie except Avengers: Infinity War. But at the very least, these campaigns can make review sites an unpleasant place to hang out — and like a lot of online anger, they don’t necessarily reflect how the majority of users feel.

Nobody has found a perfect solution to review-bombing campaigns. Some platforms have tried to create technical systems for defusing them. IMDb uses a secret weighting formula to calculate its star ratings, so in what it calls “rare instances” of mass inauthentic reviews, it “takes into consideration numerous techniques to artificially inflate/deflate a title’s rating, and attempts to neutralize their impact.” Conversely, gaming storefront Steam asks users to detect review-bombing themselves by checking patterns and quantities of ratings — although games are still notoriously vulnerable to the practice.

Reached for comment by The Verge, a Metacritic spokesperson said the site deals with the issue by not allowing users to rate films or games ahead of time, and after release, by having moderators “regularly review the site” for suspicious reviews. That’s a stance similar to the one Rotten Tomatoes is taking. Of course, if these platforms grow substantially or trolls ramp up their efforts, they could run into the same problems as YouTube or Facebook — whose human moderators are vastly outnumbered, and often overworked, dispirited, or even traumatized by dealing with constant vitriol.

In the gaming world, where developers frequently update games in response to feedback, it’s sometimes hard to draw the line between meaningful protest and pointless anger. But film-review platforms are currently facing a very specific problem: a limited group of people mass-downvoting a handful of films for broad ideological reasons. And despite its limitations, this combination of human moderation and removing obviously exploitable features might still be the best solution so far. “We’re under no illusion that there are no internet trolls,” says Buchanan. “Our aim is really to de-amplify them, and to just make it annoying or dissatisfying to try to be a troll on Letterboxd.”