Whatever you might actually think about the film, The Little Mermaid has been the target of a mass of racist online vitriol over the decision to headline Halle Bailey as the human-thirsting mermaid Ariel. Review aggregating sites like IMDb are now trying to dampen the impact of 1-star user reviews by weighting those grades.
The Disney live action remake saw wide release on May 26, and since then it’s received over 32,000 ratings on IMDb where it currently sits at a 7 out of 10. Out of those, more than 13,000 gave the flick 1 star. A small notice at the top of the ratings page reads: “Our rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title. To preserve the reliability of our rating system, an alternate weighting calculation has been applied.”
According to IMDb’s FAQ, the site publishes “weighted vote averages,” and notifies that “When unusual voting activity is detected, an alternate weighting calculation may be applied in order to preserve the reliability of our system.” The site does not say what kind of mechanism it uses to rate movies.
