the limited series’ ascension was evidence of a historic hit. The Economist ran with the numbers, comparing them to traffic spikes on the “Chernobyl nuclear disaster” Wikipedia page, declaring the show “the highest-rated TV series ever,” and marveling at the reach of its subject matter." She then criticized the ratings themselves coming from mostly white male users, while noting earlier trolling scandals where media with largely female, racialized casts and crew were purposely ranked lower in a form of widescale review manipulation, particularly if such content was political in nature. The debate over whether or not IMDb's reviews are coming from a mostly white male demographic arose again in a case where review manipulation was allegedly being used to lower the ratings score of the film Black Panther, which featured a mostly black cast and racialized storyline. Some critics have come to IMDb's defense on the matter of review manipulation in regards to more diverse media; for example, Kate Erbland (a writer for IndieWire) noted that Rotten Tomatoes, a non-Amazon film aggregation site, was facing the same type of trolling as IMDb in regards to the 2018 Disney feature film A Wrinkle in Time, which featured an ethnically-diverse cast including former talk show host Oprah Winfrey, and had drawn political tension as a result. While Erbland noted that Amazon-based subsidiaries are equipped to verify that reviewers have actually accessed the media they claim to have accessed, she pointed out, "there’s no foolproof way to verify that anyone offering up an audience review or rating have actually seen it, and everyone knows it. Gaming the system is so easy that it can be weaponized against films and creators by something as lo-fi as a Facebook group, and that problem will likely only become a more sophisticated one as other groups dedicated to bringing down scores attempt to maneuver around roadblocks." Much like subsidiary Goodreads, IMDb has faced cases of review-bombing, for example the 2022 animated feature film Lightyear, which featured a gay innuendo (a same-sex couple briefly kissing onscreen), which led to IMDb briefly locking down the page for the film so that new reviews could not be posted. Both Goodreads and IMDb use Amazon's distinctive umbrella term for review manipulation, trolling and other general acts of malice, referring to such individuals as "bad actors" in their official statements. Stagnation of subsidiaries It has been argued that Amazon's buying up of