Amazon user reviews scandal! Amazon withholds user reviews for days

The reason is, among other things, an “anti-woke” hate campaign against actors in the production. / Amazon user reviews scandal

Amazon withholds user ratings of self-produced series for up to three days, as the specialist magazine Variety found out. Since mid-August, the Amazon Prime Video service has introduced a three-day delay for user reviews on its platform. The reason: Amazon wanted to check every criticism in order to be able to separate real from fake reviews, the company said.

The delay in publishing user reviews was noticed last weekend when Amazon streamed the first two episodes of its new series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. According to Amazon, 25 million people worldwide saw the series on the first day of publication. t-online also watched the episodes. There are currently no user ratings.

With its delay measure, the group also wants to counteract the so-called “review bombing”. The term describes the flooding of platforms with negative reviews from users because they are not satisfied with the decisions made by the producers.

After the release of the first trailers for the “Lord of the Rings” series, Amazon was confronted with an “anti-woke” smear campaign on the Internet. Above all, it was about the casting of characters in the production with black actors.

Users give the series only 2.4 out of a maximum of 10 points

The fact that Amazon’s fears of such comments are justified is currently reflected on review sites such as Metacritic. There, the “Lord of the Rings” series is rated by the media with an average of 71 percent. Users, on the other hand, only give it 2.4 out of a maximum of 10 points. A user justifies his rating with Amazon’s decision to have created “Black Dwarves and Elves”.

“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” is considered the most expensive series of all time. A total of five seasons are planned. The TV show is set in the second age in the history of Middle-earth. And thus thousands of years before the events of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings”.

Filming for the first season continued in New Zealand until the summer of 2021. The second season will no longer be created in the old “Lord of the Rings” homeland, where Peter Jackson shot the original films at the time. Great Britain is intended as a production location. “We’ve written our drafts for season 2,” showrunner JD Payne recently told Radio Times, adding, “We’re a couple of weeks away from starting production.”

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New »Lord of the Rings« series / Amazon withholds user reviews

What is the most expensive series in TV history good for? Amazon’s user reviews didn’t reveal anything about this over the weekend. Behind this is a fundamental decision of the group.

You can rate just about anything on Amazon, from a 141-function Swiss Army knife to a life-size plastic rhino. But a prominently advertised product was still missing user reviews on Monday morning: “There are 0 customer reviews and 0 customer ratings,” it says about “The Rings of Power,” a $465 million Amazon series that started on Friday with a lot of Bohei – and which was accessed 25 million times worldwide on the very first day.

»Variety« provides an explanation as to why the series has garnered so many viewers but so far no publicly visible ratings. According to the US magazine, there is a fundamental decision by Amazon that was implemented in mid-August. Since then, the group has been publishing reviews for Prime Video with a deliberate delay of 72 hours.

His employees should have more time to check the submitted ratings for their authenticity. Amazon confirmed that new approach to the magazine. So, in theory, the first user reviews should be legible on Amazon this Monday (however, this wasn’t the case when this article was published).

According to “Variety” and other US media, Amazon wants to use the comparatively long review period to filter out comments from bots, but also supposedly funny troll postings and comments that fall into the “Review Bombing” category. This term describes the phenomenon that thousands of users, in actions that are sometimes more or less clearly concerted, rate a film or video game as badly as possible without looking at it because they are dissatisfied with certain decisions made by its creators.

In the case of The Rings of Power, there are netizens who are vocal about the fact that the cast is more diverse than the Lord of the Rings movies that came out in the early 2000s and that, for example, a dwarf woman doesn’t have a beard carries.

Certainly also a business decision

On Metacritic.com , where many user reviews have already appeared, one currently comes across such zero-point ratings: »This series is complete »Woke« garbage. It was made just to indoctrinate people into the communist system that the media and entertainment industry want the country to be.” That’s the full text of the review.

At Metacritic.com, »The Rings of Power« currently has a »User Score« of 2.4 out of a maximum of ten points. An overall rating based on 37 professional reviews recorded gives the series 71 out of a maximum of 100 points – which, however, is not a very good value given the production budget. At IMDB, the new release only gets a mediocre 6.6 out of 10 points – after all, this value is displayed on the product page. There, a third of the users gave the highest possible rating and almost a quarter the lowest.

In any case, Amazon’s new waiting period for reviews can also be interpreted as a business decision. In the case of complex in-house productions in particular, there is a risk for the group that mediocre ratings will prevent some Prime subscribers who are actually interested from getting an idea of ​​the new content for themselves. Of course, this is of little help when chasing record download numbers. According to the magazine “Deadline”, the review period only affects Amazon’s own productions.

See first, judge later

Incidentally, the company still has a controversial trick up its sleeve to prevent Prime Video content from being all too easily attacked by “review bombing” or simply being badly rated quickly. If you try to rate »The Rings of Power«, for example, based on the impression of the first few minutes, you will see an overlay: »Write a review after watching: We look forward to your reviews. Please come back here when you’ve finished watching the video.”