Last week, review site Rotten Tomatoes disabled a couple of long-standing features to fight a new kind of internet culture war. In advance of Captain Marvel’s release, it stopped letting users leave comments before a movie launches, and it removed a badge showing the percentage of people who indicated they wanted to see the film. “Unfortunately,” a staff blog post said, “we have seen an uptick in non-constructive input, sometimes bordering on trolling.”
Most online review platforms have encountered some kind of review-bombing — a term that broadly covers a coordinated effort to give a project an influx of negative ratings, based on some contentious issue that’s tangential to the project itself. Review-bombing isn’t universally condemned;...
