Rotten Tomatoes Under Fire After PR Firm's Scheme to Pay Critics for Positive Reviews Uncovered

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Rotten Tomatoes Under Fire After PR Firm's Scheme to Pay Critics for Positive Reviews Uncovered::A new report details how a PR firm paid off critics to post positive reviews of 2018 drama Ophelia on Rotten Tomatoes, prompting scrutiny over the reviews aggregator.

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The title makes it sound like Rotten Tomatoes deliberately did something shady. What actually seems to have happened is:

  1. Rotten Tomatoes aggregates critic reviews. As far as I know, those critics aren't really affiliated with Rotten Tomatoes.
  2. Some of the critics that make up that aggregated rating got bribed to increase their evaluation of the movie.
  3. Consequently the score on sites that aggregate reviews like Rotten Tomatoes increased.

The corruption of useful information or indexes of useful information continues.

Google Search, aggregated reviews, the Youtube algorithm, etc. They all succumb to corruption, greed and exploitation. Once something is good and useful, it becomes a target.

How does a source of aggregated information overcome becoming a target of corruption?

  1. Grab $
  2. Manipulate critics
  3. Caviar taste better than tomatoes