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Hollywood Is Losing the Battle Against Online Trolls (hollywoodreporter.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Hollywood Reporter article: It had taken years -- and the passionate support of Kirk Kerkorian, who financed the film's $100 million budget without expecting to ever make a profit -- for The Promise, a historical romance set against the backdrop of the Armenian genocide and starring Christian Bale and Oscar Isaac, to reach the screen. Producers always knew it would be controversial: Descendants of the 1.5 million Armenians killed by the Ottoman Empire shortly after the onset of World War I have long pressed for the episode to be recognized as a genocide despite the Turkish government's insistence the deaths were not a premeditated extermination. Before the critics in attendance even had the chance to exit Roy Thompson Hall, let alone write their reviews, The Promise's IMDb page was flooded with tens of thousands of one-star ratings. "All I know is that we were in about a 900-seat house with a real ovation at the end, and then you see almost 100,000 people who claim the movie isn't any good," says Medavoy. Panicked calls were placed to IMDb, but there was nothing the site could do. "One thing that they can track is where the votes come from," says Eric Esrailian, who also produced the film, and "the vast majority of people voting were not from Canada. So I know they weren't in Toronto." The online campaign against The Promise appears to have originated on sites like Incisozluk, a Turkish version of 4chan, where there were calls for users to "downvote" the film's ratings on IMDb and YouTube. A rough translation of one post: "Guys, Hollywood is filming a big movie about the so-called Armenian genocide and the trailer has already been watched 700k times. We need to do something urgently." Soon afterward, the user gleefully noted The Promise's average IMDb rating had reached a dismaying 1.8 stars. "They know that the IMDb rating will stay with the film forever," says Esrailian. "It's a kind of censorship, really."
The IMDB should make it so the user could sort the rating by geography. In this way one could, for example, filter out all the reviews from Turkey from the ratings results. or see how a film was rated by reviewers from a particular country or region.I mean IMDB is a database right?
I've been a slashdot troll since the 90s. Trolling is high art - the modern day equivalent of the court jester - the practice of teaching everyone not to take themselves too seriously.
This crap that is happening now with 4-chan esque social justice warfare against women, minorities, the historical fact of the Armenian genocide is *not* trolling. These people are doing the exact opposite of trolling - they're propping up the global misinformation machine instead of trying to convey the sense of critical thought and skepticism that I and my brethren have been working fastidiously toward for the past 3 decades (or more).
STOP calling them trolls. This is not what trolling is!
Some e-commerce sites have tags on reviews for verified buyers- maybe the movie studios should implement a similar system for movie reviews. Get a code after watching a movie, maybe by dispensing them as viewers leave (not connecting to a specific ticket to avoid privacy concerns) or when you download or buy a DVD. Use the code when reviewing the movie. Allow people to see confirmed viewer and non-confirmed ratings. Of course this could be abused, but seems no worse than the current system and might offer some improvements.
No, this is not against trolls, but something far worse. Erdogan is literally the closest thing in the industrialized world to Hitler we have. Don't believe me?
1. It's looking more and more like he staged a fake coup (remind you of the Reichstag burning?) to preemptively crush dissent.
2. He's adopted a view of immigration and migration that is close to the Nazi policy of lebensraum.
3. He has used a popular referendum to greatly empower himself and gut the authority of competing institutions.
4. He has taken a Turkish equivalent of the Nazi view about fellow Germans living in other countries. His government went nuts when European states clamped down on Turkish political organization in their borders.
5. FFS, he even channels Hitler with the moustache.
Odds are very good that if there is a mass civil war in Europe over race and religion, it will be directly the result of Erdogan's work combined with the idiocy of Merkel and a few others who let him get away with it. Anyone who considered Erdogan, who wants to resurrect Ottoman Turkey, would have wanted to keep those migrants out at bayonet point if necessary.
Turkey is a bit like North Korea. The dedication to the country is absolute and the country can do no wrong, not in history, not in the future. Turkey wants to be a member of the EU. Yay Turkey. Turkey thinks the EU is an evil institution against everything Turkey stands for. Yay Turkey. Turkey doesn't have a dark and evil past, anyone saying otherwise is just trying to re-write history. Turkey's current supreme leader is nothing like a dictator. Anyone saying otherwise is just a supporter of Fethullah Gulen who had the audacity to try and overthrow the Turkish government by coupe ... while not even in the country.
All over Europe, the only foreign flags I see waved at protests are for Turkey, the greatest country in the world. We don't want to live there, but don't you dare tell us they aren't the greatest. Yay Turkey.
Also genocide didn't happen.
I was going to suggest that the alternative title could be "Someone Didn't Get The Memo: IMDb Scores Are Still Useless".
A few years back, I used an extension to display IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic scores in Netflix's web UI, thinking they'd help me cut through the chaff and find the films I was most interested in. It became apparent almost immediately that while the Rotten Tomatoes scores were good and the Metacritic scores were occasionally decent, the IMDb scores were nothing more than useless noise, given that they were so far out of sync both with what the other sites are reporting, as well as what my own experiences would suggest reasonable scores should be for the films I had seen. And really, none of this should come as a surprise, given that IMDb is a wiki platform with poor policing, meaning that the scores have become a battleground for various forms of e-peen measuring contests.
So far as I'm concerned, Rotten Tomatoes has for years done a far better job, particularly with their distinction between critic and audience scores, which makes it much easier to understand what to expect from a movie:
- High critic score/high audience score = probably the best thing I'll see all year
- High critic score/low audience score = a thought-provoking film that likely won't entertain
- Low critic score/high audience score = mindless, "junk food" entertainment
- Low critic score/low audience score = a trash film that's only thought-provoking inasmuch as it begs the question: why was this film was made?
In contrast, IMDb scores give me no useful information. They don't tell me what to expect, whether I'll like the film, or even if it's a good film. They're just noise.
It has nothing to do with them being Muslims
Are you sure?
In 2011, Erdoan ordered the tearing-down of the Statue of Humanity, a Turkish-Armenian friendship monument in Kars, which was commissioned in 2006 and represented a metaphor of the rapprochement of the two countries after many years of dispute over the events of 1915. Erdoan justified the removal by stating that the monument was offensively close to the tomb of an 11th-century Islamic scholar,
In other news, people who did bad things in the past continue to deny having done bad things.
The Turks don't deny that bad things happened, nor do they deny that they were the ones that did it.
What they do deny is that it amounted to genocide. In 1915 the British Empire landed 250,000 troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula, and the Russians launched a major offensive in the Caucasus. The Turks were fighting for their survival as a nation. The Gallipoli landing failed, mostly due to astoundingly incompetent leadership on the allied side, but also due to the brilliant and decisive leadership of Mustafa Kemal on the Turkish side. But the Russian offensive was successful, partly due to support from Armenians who viewed the Russians as liberators. In "liberated" areas, thousands of Armenians volunteered to fight with the Russians.
In the face of this offensive, and clear evidence that the Armenians were a "fifth column", there were Turkish reprisals and massacres, but mostly the Turks tried to deal with the Armenians by deporting them to Northern Syria (which was then part of their empire). This was all done during the deprivations of a world war, and many, many Armenians died enroute to Syria and in the camps once they got there.
Did bad things happen to the Armenians?
Yes.
Did really REALLY bad things happen to the Armenians?
Yes.
Did millions of Armenians die as a result of Turkish actions?
Yes.
Did this amount to a centrally planned and coordinated effort to exterminate the Armenian people?
I don't think so.
Since Armenia is a landlocked country mostly surrounded by neighbors that hate them even more than the Turks do, and Turkey is their main route to the sea and one of their biggest trading partners, is it really in the best interest of the Armenian people to focus on "re-labelling" atrocities that happened over a century ago, rather than facing up to the many many problems that face Armenia today?
You decide.
Have you seen the ratings for Tropes Vs Women? They didn't do anything about that either.
Not everything is an SJW conspiracy.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC