The infamous (no, you heard right) film review site RottenTomatoes.com recently started a campaign against "Hate Speech" in anticipation of skewed reviews upon the release of Black Panther.
If Twitter and Youtube have taught us anything, it's that "hate speech" is subjective and filtering it can be considered a form of censorship. In the case of Black Panther, it probably worked to keep the onslaught of bogus reviews from skewing results at the cost of a few honest reviews.
How has this affected other films since the campaign started though? Let's have a look.
I'm looking particularly at User Ratings and Reviews Counted. Reviews Counted is the number for how many reviews were accepted after throwing a few out. Since RottenTomatoes.com is less than transparent about what's being kept and what's being tossed, we can only imagine how this is affecting reviews.
Filtering content is a slippery slope. Personally, I'm against censorship of any kind. I'm also against SPAM and "hate speech". I think a lot of "hate speech" is left unfiltered while a lot of other content that I wouldn't consider hateful ends up being filtered. It's entirely subjective, and I don't think it's possible to get this kind of filter to work without hurting someone. I think SPAM can be dealt with in other ways.
Just my personal opinions on this matter.