Amazon has built up one of the most popular VoD offerings worldwide with its Prime Video streaming service in recent years. Now a new tactic is supposed to help in the fight against spam reviews.
On September 2, Amazon released the series “The Rings of Power” on its Prime Video streaming platform. Just 24 hours later, it is clear that the series from the “Lord of the Rings” universe has set a new record with 25 million viewers worldwide. Never before has a series celebrated such a premiere on the streaming service.
But where such a large number of people gather, spam is not far away – as is often the case on the Internet. To curb this, at least for movie and series reviews, Amazon has come up with a new strategy, as Variety reports.
Prime Video declares war on spam reviews
Reviews on Prime Video no longer appear immediately. That’s because Amazon has introduced a time delay in the fight against spam comments.
In the future, the streaming service will publish user reviews 72 hours later. In the meantime, these can be checked for authenticity.
Amazon has introduced the change “quietly,” according to Variety. It is said to have been in effect since the Aug. 12 launch of the baseball dramedy “A League of Their Own.” A representative for the streaming provider confirmed the new policy to Variety.
Amazon thus wants to ensure that the published reviews are not fakes, for example, by bots.
What does the series “The Rings of Power” have to do with it?
The new practice was noticed in the course of the premiere of the new “Lord of the Rings” series. Because the series sometimes has to fight with negative reviews.
According to Variety, the reason is the decision to also use actors of color for the roles as elves, dwarves or hard feet. For months, the series has been fighting against trolls who take offense to this.
This is also apparent, for example, on the review website Rotten Tomatoes. While the new series “The Rings of Power” has a rating of 84 percent among professional critics, it only manages 39 percent among users.
No reviews for the new series are yet available on Amazon itself. Whether Prime Video’s delaying tactics will work will probably only become clear in the coming days.
