IMDb Pulls Down ‘The Kashmir Files’ Rating After ‘Unusual Voting Activity’
As Vivek Agnihotri’s ‘The Kashmir Files’ attracts attention at the box office with its strong posturing on the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits three decades ago, IMDb (Internet Movie Database), a go-to web catalogue for films across the globe, has scaled down the rating of the movie.
According to India Today, while 94% of people gave it a 10 rating, 4% of people rated it 1. This resulted in a 9.9 rating in the days following the film’s release. However, IMDb has brought down the rating to 8.3, suspecting “unusual voting activity” on the film’s webpage.
A note on IMDb’s website read “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.”
It added that “IMDb publishes weighted vote averages rather than raw data averages. The simplest way to explain it is that although we accept and consider all votes received by users, not all votes have the same impact (or ‘weight’) on the final rating. When unusual voting activity is detected, an alternate weighting calculation may be applied in order to preserve the reliability of our system. To ensure that our rating mechanism remains effective, we do not disclose the exact method used to generate the rating.”
Meanwhile, the director of the film took to Twitter and called the scaling down of rating “unusual and unethical”.
Several Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states – including Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka – have exempted the film from entertainment tax. In Madhya Pradesh, police personnel also got special leave if they wanted to watch the movie with their family.
The film was released on March 11 and stars Anupam Kher, Pallavi Joshi, Darshan Kumaar and others.
“The Kashmiri Pandits’ pain is real and should be expressed in popular culture, but it deserved a more nuanced, more objective take rather than the ‘us vs them’ worldview that Agnihotri has propagated over 170 minutes,” a movie reviewer at The Hindu has written.
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