The Little Mermaid's 'review bombing' is just a sign of what's to come

The Little Mermaid, Dis‐ ney's latest live action re‐ make of a cartoon classic, has been out for a week and is raising a question for all of us — and no, it's not how much Awkwafina rap it takes to go deaf.

Instead, it's one more of‐ ten seen in biology. As ani‐ mals have the ability to send each other all sorts of mes‐ sages — brightly coloured frogs warning predators of their toxicity, loud bird calls to let a predator know they've been spotted — there's the obvious question: what moti‐ vates any of them to tell each other the truth?

In evolutionary science, the argument goes, "honest" signals survive because if everyone lies, no one trusts, which means both a lot more predators are killed by eating poisonous frogs, and a lot more frogs end up getting eaten.

Now, a supposed "review bombing" campaign against The Little Mermaid's is chal‐ lenging that in the world of entertainment, or perhaps showing that the way we judge, interpret and under‐ stand media is about to change

The bombs, in this case, are one-star reviews posted to aggregator sites like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb, which draw not just from published reviews from critics but crowd-sourced input.

It's not clear they're from people who have even seen the movie, but rather, people trying to make a point — the same racist point that has fol‐ lowed Disney's live-action re‐ make of The Little Mer‐ maid since it was announced that Halle Bailey, who is Black, would play Ariel.

'Unusual voting activity' Despite making an impres‐ sive $250 million in interna‐ tional box office, an honest accounting of audience recep‐ tion seemed to be elusive. Be‐ cause even as Rotten Toma‐ toes showed a 95 per cent au‐ dience score and IMDb a 7/10 rating, the latter tagged that number with a warning.

"Our rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title," the page reads. "To preserve the relia‐ bility of our rating system, an alternate weighting calcula‐ tion has been applied."

Though IMDb did not re‐ spond to a request for com‐ ment as to how their scores were adjusted, the site lists its unweighted mean average of 4.6 out of 10, with 22,000 onestar votes — accounting for more than 40 per cent of all responses.

For Rotten Tomatoes, its 95 per cent fresh rating is from its "verified audience" — those who were able to prove they had actually bought a ticket to the movie. When checking for all audience re‐ sponses, that number drops down to 56 per cent. Metacrit‐ ic, which seemingly didn't fur‐ ther tinker with its averages, shows a 2.1 out of 10 audi‐ ence score.

As to why review aggrega‐ tors would be against includ‐ ing negative reviews at all, it speaks to the reason these sites exist— and what distin‐ guishes honest negative re‐ views, part of what these crowd-sourced sites are de‐ signed to capture, from re‐ view bombings.

"It is generally something that people do, not because they want to meaningfully en‐ gage or critique media, but because they feel that there is some ideological or cultural message that's being forced upon them," explained Claire Whitley, a PhD candidate in Screen and Media at Flinders University who has written about the trend of review bombing.

WATCH | The Little Mer‐ maid's biggest win? It's not the most terrible Disney remake:

"Bad reviewing is some‐ thing that's always going to happen and should happen … but review bombing is gener‐ ally ideologically driven, and it's generally, although not al‐ ways, coordinated by large groups online."

When it comes to The Lit‐ tle Mermaid, Whitley said, that's evident for a number of reasons. Compare its reviews to past similar productions and the difference jumps out: The Lion King and Al‐ addin were, like The Little Mermaid, criticized for being shallow remakes of the origi‐ nal, but had verified audience scores within ten per cent of "all audience." And even with the lukewarm reception — in‐ cluding from this reviewer — the skew between extremely high and extremely low rat‐ ings "are nowhere near as stark as they are for The Little Mermaid."

It started in video games The opposite can, and does, happen as well: "review spamming," or leaving over‐ whelmingly positive ratings to promote political messages as opposed to genuine reaction to a piece of media. That cam‐ paign has started for The Lit‐ tle Mermaid to a degree, but if the history of review bombing is to be trusted, it's unlikely to end up being as large a prob‐ lem for review sites and me‐ dia literacy at large.

According to James Birt, an associate professor of video games at Australia's Bond University, review bombing as a dominant and influential tactic has its roots in the video game community.

While the IMDb statement over Little Mermaid is unique, Birt says over the past two decades review bombing on video games has become such a pervasive problem it leads to such statements of‐ ten: just last month gaming company Gaijin released a statement pleading with con‐ sumers to stop review bomb‐ ing their game War Thunder.

A month before that, Metacritic issued a statement of their own in light of review bombing over a gay storyline in Horizon Forbidden West. There, after a litany of 0/10 re‐ views criticized the fact that a DLC chapter gave players the option to have one character kiss another of the same sex, Metacritic stated they will "in‐ troduce stricter moderation in the coming months."

And after introducing new measures to identify review bombing in 2019, parent com‐ pany Valve said they inter‐ vened in 44 incidents on gam‐ ing platform Steam that year — while taking a hands-off ap‐ proach to review spamming.

"Games [were] a little bit of the canary in the coal mine," Birt said. "What we are seeing with the major websites is that they're acknowledging that misinformation is occur‐ ring. They're acknowledging that there is a strange trend to what is happening."

But where at least some of the strategy behind review bombing is to give users a way to fight for consumer protection (War Thunder was review bombed for making players spend actual money in-game to win) Birt said as it's spread to cinema and TV, it's morphed into a bullhorn for culture wars.

"When one sees a huge swath of one-star ratings, or 1/10, or 1/100 or 0, it's not re‐ flective of a reality," he said. "It's 100 per cent done to weaponize a political argu‐ ment."

Future of aggregation sites

As that has taken hold, he said, gamers have had less and less reason to trust in media aggregate sites' track‐ ing of "real people's" respons‐ es — originally intended to get an honest accounting that professional critics weren't trusted to provide.

Yolanda Machado, a digital editor with Entertainment Weekly, said the same could happen for movies and TV:

fans will distrust ratings due to review bombing, and as sites struggle to weed out negative reviews detractors will argue numbers have been arbitrarily inflated.

As that happens, reviews may become ineffective enough for the pendulum to swing the other way, and honesty in reviews to return. On the other hand, she said, it could be the coming of the end for review sites in general — the deciding factor is how audiences will react.

"It really is going to be de‐ termined by who is reading these," she said, "and whether or not they have the media literacy to see beyond the racism."