The fight against trolls goes beyond Captain Marvel, YouTube, and Rotten Tomatoes
It was as predictable as a lie from Loki: Before Captain Marvel even opened, Rotten Tomatoes was getting bombarded with negative reviews from sexist dipshits trying to tank the latest film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, because the movie had the temerity to explicitly be a woman’s narrative, and star Brie Larson had the audacity to suggest that it might be cool to have a slightly more diverse group of journalists covering the film. Before you could say, “What a blatant bad-faith twisting of her words and actions into some weirdo claim of anti-white-guy bias,” the hordes of online chuds sprang into action.
Thankfully, this time Rotten Tomatoes wasn’t having any of it. The site changed its policy, purging the advance reviews of the movie and instituting a new rule preventing such ahead-of-time tactics in the future. Which brings us to the obvious outcome today, the first day of Captain Marvel’s wide release: A new round of trolls review-bombing the film en masse. But again, Rotten Tomatoes is responding. And it’s not the only one: YouTube has also begun taking action against some of the more noxious corners of its expansive universe of videos, also to combat the creepy and politically repellent campaigns against Brie Larson, the film, and more. Unfortunately, this problem is bigger than Captain Marvel—and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
Within hours of Captain Marvel’s release, an orchestrated troll campaign went into action. Tens of thousands of negative reviews, largely from people who almost certainly hadn’t seen the movie, flooded Rotten Tomatoes, tanking the aggregate score of the newest MCU entry. That this was an obvious bad-faith trolling tactic is clear from the numbers: As ComicBook.com notes, in less than 12 hours, the site had racked up almost 60,000 reviews for Captain Marvel—compare that to the 53,000 reviews given to Avengers: Infinity War over the entirety of its theatrical run, and it was immediately apparent this was a troll-led bombing campaign. The site has already purged roughly 54,000 phony reviews, and presumably that process will continue for some time. Rian Johnson, The Last Jedi director who knows unfortunately all too well the effects of concerted efforts from some of the worst people on the internet, had a bit of fun pointing out that these campaigns are equivalent to the site’s signature seal of approval: