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

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 163 points – Rotten Tomatoes Under Fire After PR Firm's Scheme to Pay Critics for Positive Reviews Uncovered - IGN
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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

Title is misleading. Why Rotten Tomatoes? The bribes went to critics not to the site which is just a critics aggregator.

I mean this was so obvious. Pay for positive critic reviews and call any user reviews that weren't favourable names.

Bad Boys For Life on 90 score convinced me the site was a fraud. That Shit is unwatchable.

I've been using IMDB for the past year or so. Anyone know if they pay for reviews too?

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Rotten Tomatoes will also stop all new reviews if a movie is bombing. They definitely manipulate their ratings.

Edit Two Rotten Tomatoes employees downvoted this comment.