Amazon Is Making Trolls Wait 72 Hours to Review ‘The Rings of Power’

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has called attention to Amazon’s latest attempt to stop trolls from submitting negative reviews for Prime Video shows the moment they start to stream.

Variety reports(Opens in a new window) that Amazon decided to delay reviews for new Prime Video shows until 72 hours after their debut when A League of Their Own came out in August. But it seems most Amazon users didn’t notice this new policy until The Rings of Power officially premiered on Sept. 2.

That’s probably because The Rings of Power is more popular than every other Prime Video original to date. Amazon says(Opens in a new window) the show “attracted more than 25 million global viewers on its first day, breaking all previous records, marking the biggest premiere in the history of Prime Video.”

Amazon’s efforts to prevent review bombing(Opens in a new window)—wherein as many people as possible write negative reviews about TV shows, movies, and other media because they disagree with something about its content, its creator, and other mostly irrelevant factors—don’t stop with this 72-hour delay.

Variety reports that each Prime Video review is “evaluated to determine whether it’s genuine or a forgery created by a bot, troll, or other breed of digital goblin” even after the three-day moratorium ends. (Similar mechanisms try, and often fail(Opens in a new window), to combat fake reviews elsewhere on Amazon.)

It seems that some amount of monitoring occurs on IMDb as well. At time of writing, The Rings of Power doesn’t have any user reviews lower than six stars on the platform(Opens in a new window) even though its audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes(Opens in a new window) sits at 38% because of the sheer number of half- and one-star reviews.

Amazon should allow users to post The Rings of Power reviews on its own platform soon. Then we’ll see how effective this delay was at dissuading users from review bombing the show.