Amazon delays The Rings of Power rankings to fight fake reviews | The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

Amazon has started delaying user reviews on its video streaming service for up to three days to combat false ratings.

The move is an effort to combat a series of “review bombs” prompted, in part, by an “anti-revival” backlash to the diverse cast of the company’s Lord of the Rings prequel series, The Rings of Power, which features non-white actors cast as elves and dwarves.

On review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, the show has an average rating of 84% from critics, but an average audience rating of 38%. Even on IMDb, the Amazon-owned movie and TV site, the show drew 17,500 one-star ratings, 25% reviews for the title, though many of them were overlooked by the ratings. “weighted average” of the site, which attempts to downgrade “unusual voting activity”.

However, Amazon’s Prime Video streaming site, where the new show premiered, is currently not displaying any customer reviews due to the delay. According to Variety, who first spotted the new practicethe streaming service uses the delay to determine if a review is “genuine or fake”.

The company also has another weapon against review bombardment: users cannot post reviews of The Rings of Power until they watch the show. As a result, the first reviews are expected to appear on Monday morning, 72 hours after the first episode aired at 2am UK time on Friday.

Bombardments of reviews, positive and negative, have become a reality for media franchises with large, devoted and often unruly fanbases, who use sites such as Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes to leave messages in large quantities, driving down ratings. bugging and sometimes having a bang. effect on the commercial success of the production.

Campaigns can be triggered by anything from backlash against casting decisions (a 2016 Ghostbusters remake was bombarded for its all-female stars) to complaints about geopolitical slights (the video game Life is Strange : True Colors has been bombarded by Chinese players for including a Tibetan flag in a snap and you’ll miss it).

By taking action against fake reviews for its own multimillion-dollar TV show, however, Amazon risks being accused of hypocrisy for controlling reviews elsewhere on the e-commerce site. A survey this year “unveiled that there are still unscrupulous companies exploiting weaknesses in Amazon’s review system,” said Rocio Concha, director of policy and advocacy at the advocacy group. consumers, “leaving at-risk shoppers buying products spurred on by thousands of fake five-star reviews.