Amazon pauses user reviews to protect ‘The Rings of Power’ from trolls

Amazon doesn’t yet want your opinion on its massive TV project The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The streaming and tech giant has paused user reviews just as the series dropped in an effort to prevent review bombing, the practice where people flood a show with negative comments.

The idea is to basically weed out the reviews that are posted in bad faith. The Rings of Power has a diverse cast and the usual cast of internet trolls, of course, isn’t happy about that. Variety reported that user reviews on Amazon have been put under a 72-hour delay, a practice that apparently started around the August premiere of the show A League of Their Own.

Citing an Amazon source, Variety wrote that “each critique is then evaluated to determine whether it’s genuine or a forgery created by a bot, troll or other breed of digital goblin.” The 72 hours for reviewing the reviews will run out on Sunday.

While The Rings of Power has already become the subject of mostly light-hearted memes, the show long contended with the more nefarious side of the internet since its announcement. While Amazon has paused reviews on the show on its own site, other websites have shown a massive difference between professional critics and users.

On Rotten Tomatoes the show has an 84 percent approval rating from critics. Despite the show pulling in a huge number of viewers, the audience score is somehow just 38 percent. Lots of the user reviews post under the guise of the show somehow disrespecting the work of author J.R.R. Tolkien. One person who left a half-star review was less subtle, writing “terrible acting, all the token characters and PC correctness is nauseatingly bad.”

For what it’s worth, our site’s review noted the show did everything but disrespect Tolkien. Mashable’s Belen Edwards called the show a “stunning, meticulously crafted love letter to J.R.R. Tolkien and Middle-earth.”