A movie about the Armenian Genocide, called The Promise, has received 129k reviews and the majority of them are negative.<p>With only 3 airings previously and an airing date today, this is clearly not right.<p>I hope this gets the attention of someone working on IMDB and sets this straight.<p>http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4776998/
Wikipedia has some more information on the issue:<p>"By the end of October 2016, before its official release and after only three pre-release screenings in September 2016 at the Toronto International Film Festival to small audiences, IMDb had registered over 86,000 ratings for the film. 55,126 of which were one-star and 30,639 of which were 10-star, with very few ratings falling anywhere in between. The majority of these votes had been cast by males outside of the US. By mid-November the total was over 91,000 votes, with over 57,000 one-star votes. Commentators assessed that these were mostly votes by people who had never seen the film, and that the one star voting was part of an orchestrated campaign by Armenian Genocide deniers to downrate the movie, which had then initiated an Armenian response to highly rate the movie."<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Promise_(2016_film)#IMDb_public_votes_controversy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Promise_(2016_film)#IMDb_p...</a>
This is definitely an unfortunate event for Turks (I'm one of them) There was several facebook groups and pages distributing heavily negative opinions about movie. Comments about movie were mess. Definitely a terrible shame for all Turks. Even if they are right about history (that's really unlikely, historical evidence points opposite. As a Turk I believe that was more than a cruel war. And probably I will be down voted because of this message.) Starting a campaign against a movie they have never seen, and putting 1 star and asking for more people to thrash out the movie on IMDB, was another wrong. It won't make it right. I am truly sorry for those people who gave efforts for that movie in the name of my people. It was even 1 point last month. I tried to put my
opinion about how wrong that campaign in social media. But again I have been blamed for ridiculous claims. It was just a mass mania. Craziness. Can't even find a better word to describe it. So there is clearly no hope for a Turk - Armenian peace any time soon. And I am really disappointed, frustrated for this.
For those who don't understand the negative reviews, this is an attempt at subversion by Turkish Armenian Genocide deniers to continue a campaign of suppressing any medium that goes against their narrative.<p>Sadly, the campaign is working. In a time where we are as interconnected as we are, a political film with tens of thousands of fake reviews should send out a huge red flag: someone doesn't want this movie to be seen. However the reality is that not many people are even aware there are so many fake reviews. The mainstream media is not covering this issue. IMDB has not responded. I'm not sure why this is, but can guess that it's related to the subject not being newsworthy & risk of harm with Turkish relations (i.e. why the U.S. refuses to officially acknowledge the genocide).<p>Many people are going to visit the ratings page before deciding to watch the film, and of those some will decide it's not worth their time because of the overwhelmingly negative score.
Considering the high frequency of Turkish films on the bottom list[1], it might be the case of a number of people with too much time on their hands rather than something more serious<p>[1] <a href="http://www.imdb.com/chart/bottom" rel="nofollow">http://www.imdb.com/chart/bottom</a>
It would be so much easier to spot fake comments or highly controversial subjects if rating systems would also show how the rating is distributed. This shouldn't be very hard to implement, too.
why would i use imdb without discussion boards? pretty much everything I need to know about movie i can find on TMDb.org plus discussions for each movie on top of it and if it's empty there I can just check imdb archive at hashed.io for specific movie, people should really stop using imdb after what they did in February