No...
No, it can't be...!
Why?
Why do you hate me?
I-I double-checked the math, I swear!
I did the research!
Dub AND Sub!
Not a casual fan, no...!
Of COURSE I READ THE COMICS!
Why... *Trump joke onscreen*
Jeez...
Did you SEE that like-dislike ratio?
What a nightmare...
Film Theory Intro in 4...
Film Theory Intro in 3...
Film Theory Intro in 2...
Film Theory Intro in 1...
HELLO INTERNET!
Welcome to Film Theory,
where we don't shy away from the scariest corners of the Internet.
And I'm not talking about Dark Web or Russian hackers,
I'm talking about ONLINE REVIEWS!
Now, if you've made any YouTube videos of your own,
you know the scariest part of being online
is what everyone else THINKS about you being online.
In a place where everyone is an influencer in some way and can review anything at anytime,
there's some serious stress when it comes to putting yourself out there to be judged.
I mean, just look at me.
To a lot of people, I am the LITERAL cancer of the Internet that they just can't chemotherapy away.
Sorry guys, I can't help it if people take my theories just a *wee bit* too seriously.
But YouTubers are NOTHING compared to the paranoia of big movie studios
Where the biggest companies on the planet spend the biggest dollar amounts on the planet
to make sure you're getting the best impression of their movie.
Whether it's through cool marketing gimmicks like recreating the entirety of Westworld,
or just telling you that Ebert and Robert gave it 35 thumbs up!
Movie reviews that come out before anyone has had a chance to see a movie
can mean the difference of millions of dollars at the box office.
Just look at one of the best examples from last year: Justice League.
One of the most intensely judged, and also least-watched movies of 2017.
Critics hated it, fans were divided about it, and
by the time it came out almost no one went to see it.
Even more bizarrely though, for a movie that didn't have itself a lot of viewers,
it certainly caused an all-out Internet war on places like Rotten Tomatoes:
a site that is KNOWN for tanking box office sales if it puts out a bad review score.
Things got so heated that it wasn't all that surprising when
accusations of "review rigging" started to pop up.
Claiming that the reviews weren't from real moviegoers but were instead from, the scourge of the Internet,
Bot Accounts.
Seriously, accusations surfaced all across the Internet on both sides of the aisle,
with one side claiming that Marvel and Disney unleashed bots with Marvel bias to tank the performance of "Justice League"
and on the other side, there were accusations that DC had to create fake bot reivews
so they could still claim that people liked the movie in the first place!
And honestly, if you stop and think about it, can you blame any of this suspicion?
Take one look at the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes for "Justice League"
and it definitely seems like something fishy's going on.
An 80% Audience Approval Rating?
I gotta say, that made me do a little bit of a double-take,
especially when you compare it to the critic's score of 41 percent!
Did audiences really like it more than TWICE as much as critics?
I mean, I saw the movie and it was... fine.
It wasn't as high as an 80% but it definitely wasn't as low as a 40%.
It was... okay.
But could DC be using bots to up its score to ensure that America saw the Red-Orange fight scenes that they had worked so hard on?
Is it really that far-fetched of a claim?
These movies cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make,
so wouldn't it make sense for the big studios to spend just a little bit more to nudge the odds ever in their favor?
So that, ladies and gentlemen, is the episode of today:
Explore the world of bots in order to determine whether the reviews of "Justice League" were influenced,
either for the good or the bad, by a bot army attack.
Don't just believe the speculative headlines, today the TRUTH shall be revealed.
Every day, more and more stories seem to start circulating about bots.
Bots rigging elections,
Yelp bots rigging reviews of restaurants,
But to understand how bot systems work
and to figure out whether it's possible for movie studios to rig a system like Rotten Tomatoes,
we first have to have a solid understanding of what bots actually are.
The term gets thrown around quite a bit,
but do you actually know what a bot IS?
Before researching this episode I thought I did,
but the world of Internet botting is a much deeper rabbit hole than I first realized.
Web Robots or "Bots" for short are basically an online program that can do a whole bunch of little tasks automatically
without anyone actually having to control what's going on from a computer.
In theory, they're awesome.
They're basically the worker BEES of the Internet
that can complete the same task over and over and over again
without a human having to waste the time to do it.
And in a lot of cases, they are a good thing.
There are news stories coming out about bots being able to make people's jobs easier.
By answering tech support questions without keeping customers on hold for hours
to stopping streams of negativity and harassment on social media.
75% of executives at the world's biggest companies say that using bots for things like talking to customers
isn't just an "if", it's a "when".
So then, what's the big problem here?
Well, the issue is that the technology is getting SO good that you can't tell a bot from a person.
Which makes it almost impossible to trust anything that you see said on the Internet.
To show you what I mean, let's take a look at one type of bot.
The IRC Bot.
The IRC (or Internet Relay Chat Bot)
Can be designed to look like a person on any website that has a chat function *hi*
idk