Who do you believe — the techies at Rotten Tomatoes or the anonymous alt-right guy who runs a website trashing Disney and “The Last Jedi”?
At issue is whether bots, automated programs, are flooding the movie-review website with criticisms of the latest “Star Wars” episode.
HuffPost’s Bill Bradley and Matthew Jacobs write of a Facebook exchange with the operator of “Down With Disney’s Treatment of Franchises and its Fanboys.”
That FB page manager claims that he depressed Jedi’s Audience Score to 54 percent “liked it” while the critics’ “Tomatometer” shows 92 percent approval.
“When pressed for specific complaints against ‘The Last Jedi,’ the Down With Disney moderator expounded on his disdain for its “feminist agenda,” HuffPost said.
“Regarding female heroes: Did you not see everything that came out of Ghostbusters? That is why,” he said. “I’m sick and tired of men being portrayed as idiots. There was a time we ruled society and I want to see that again. That is why I voted for Donald Trump.”
But Forbes quoted Dana Benson, vice president of communications at Fandango, the parent company of Rotten Tomatoes.
“We have several teams of security, network and social database experts who constantly monitor reviews and ratings to ensure that they are genuine,” Benson said.
“They haven’t seen anything unusual with ‘The Last Jedi,’ except that there has been an uptick in the number of written user reviews submitted. Aside from that, everything is normal and we don’t see any unusual activity. We looked at ‘The Last Jedi’ compared to other blockbusters and it has been consistent with those past films.”
In other words: No outside tampering.
One theory is that the Disney-hater is claiming responsibility for something that looks suspicious.
But could bots be the reason some “Last Jedi” reviews accidentally ended up on “The Shape of Water” page?
“HuffPost confirmed that both positive and negative ‘Last Jedi’ reviews appeared on the Rotten Tomatoes page for “The Shape of Water’ and that they seem to have first appeared on the night of the ‘Last Jedi’ release.”
Meanwhile, the “Down with Disney” manager has >posted a petition on change.org titled “Remove Kathleen Kennedy as Head of Lucasfilm for Pushing Feminist Agenda.”
It had 13 signatories as of noon Thursday. Perhaps the bots have yet to kick in.