A few weeks ago I was talking on social media and I said succinctly Rotten Tomatoes scores no longer hold any value because the platform has been caught being manipulated in prior attempts to boost scores. It was only a matter of time before Rise of Skywalker was subsequently caught with an artificially increased metric.
Coming from Reclaim the Net and Youtuber Shella Allen The Rise of Skywalker has now been caught artificially boosting their review scores on Rotten Tomatoes.
Typically the reviews in question are short averaging about five words per review from verified accounts that have no profile image. Not having a profile picture is not a definitive indicator that a review is inherently fake, but it many of said suspect reviews are coming from accounts without avatars.
(Pic Courtesy of Reclaim the Net as when I got there spammed postings were already buried)
Youtuber Shella Allen utilized a scraper program to analyze the composition of the reviews allowing her to discover several interesting patterns occurring with suspect reviews. Chiefly of her observations she notes that many of the fake reviews are five words in length or utilize the word “saga”, “trilogy,” or “story.”
Metacrtic was not free from fake reviews. While the score sits considerably lower at 50% as of this writing compared to Rotten Tomatoes 86% it wasn’t hard to locate numerous examples of fake reviews for the movie. Simply limiting my search to 10/10 reviews was enough to bring up several examples of fake reviews with each instance of a 10/10.
Artificial reviews are fairly lazy in their operations. Rather than maintain as any intelligent person would a series of accounts that would each post various reviews based on groupings to appear as if active users, they simply create new accounts en-mass. This does make it fairly easy to spot fake reviews regardless of whether an account has a profile pic or not as they tend to only have 1 or 2 reviews per account.
Certainly there will be a small percentage of users who’s first review may be Rise of Skywalker, but when the vast majority of 10/10s have 1-2 reviews per account that is indicative of a trend of fake accounts.
After the movie dropped 59% at the box office in only a week, according to a report from Forbes, it doesn’t appear whatever was spent inflating the review scores on Rotten Tomato and Metacritic accomplished much of anything other than further waste more money on the project.
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