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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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Of course, if you assume that Rottentomatoes is not manipulating any data than the data comes back to show exactly what they're telling you.

I don't assume that; I tried to investigate the possibility by corroborating the RT figures with more transparant sources like IMDB, and I think it's plausible that the RT verified audience score is real.

It sounds like you've predetermined that RT is explicitly manipulating the data (beyond the biased selection mechanisms which we've already discussed) and you are not willing to consider evidence to the contrary.

I get that if you're an old conservative curmudgeon on a forum of likeminded people it's hard to imagine that 95% of the audience could like this movie, but you should at least be able to realize you're not the target audience, and consider the possibility that the actual audience doesn't have the same preferences as you do.

What percentage of Mottizens do you think are fans of Cardi B's music? And what percentage of people who attended a Cardi B concert do you think would say they enjoyed the show?

It seems easy for a website like Rottentomatoes to just turn off commentless zero star reviews for something

Okay, but this is a testable hypothesis at least. I don't see any reviews with less than ½ star or with no text. Is it even possible to give a zero-star rating or leave a rating without any comment? Or maybe comment-less ratings don't show up on the site but are still included in the score?

Protecting TV shows/videogames/movies from review-bombing for political reasons is considered just what a good/respectable company does these days.

Again, you assume that measures against review bombing are taken only for political reasons. Even witout politics, you need to do something to prevent review-bombing, otherwise scores reflect nothing but which group was able to drum up a larger army of trolls. That's obviously not what movie ratings should be about, regardless of political views.

I don't blame review sites for trying to combat that; I would probably do the same thing if I ran such a site, and I'm not left-wing and definitely not woke.

I have no idea why you've gone into multi-quote argument failure mode. I mostly agree with you and just think it's still not unlikely that they manipulated data because I'm biased that way and I've explained why.