Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes has been accused of removing posts critical of Doctor Who Series 12, resulting in the current run being given a higher rating than it would otherwise have.

Cosmic Book News carries reports said to be from a number of reviewers who complain that their negative verdicts on the early episodes of Series 12 have disappeared from the site after they were posted.

“Well, I’m disappointed that my original rating was removed for no justifiable reason,” one user reported. “My grievances with the current running of the show are absolutely genuine, and as a fan of the series for over 2 decades, a follower of the audios and reader of the comics, I see no reason why my rating should be deemed fit for removal. I can only imagine that it was inconveniently rated too low, which is a fault of the show and how it is currently run, not a faulted opinion from myself!”

As with so many stories concerning how the internet is used, it’s difficult if not impossible to get a sense of how reliable this all is. It’s certainly not the first time Rotten Tomatoes has been accused of this kind of behaviour; last year, thousands of scores and comments regarding the Captain Marvel movie were removed.

In that instance, the website justified the removal on the grounds that a bug had affected their system, causing pre-release ‘want to see’ scores being incorrectly included in the film’s post-release audience score. As yet there’s been no response from Rotten Tomatoes in the case of Doctor Who Series 12.

At the time of writing, Doctor Who’s current season has a ‘Tomatometer’ ranking of 83% on Rotten Tomatoes and an audience score of 16%, indicating a significant disparity between what professional critics and the site’s users think. There’s nothing so unusual in that, of course, but it does perhaps help to illustrate how suspicions of underhand actions can blossom into conspiracy theories.

Given such a low audience score from users of Rotten Tomatoes for the series (and it’s worth bearing in mind that they don’t necessarily reflect the views of the show’s audience as a whole), it’s difficult to see why the site would bother to delete reviews which would further depress an already very low score – but it may be I’m missing something.

Read more on this at Cosmic Book News and see for yourself what Rotten Tomatoes is saying about Doctor Who Series 12.