The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power collected a lot of negative reviews, and its rating began to fall, including on Amazon Prime Video streaming itself, where the series began to air on September 2. Now it has come to light that all reviews on the Amazon platform will be published with a 72-hour delay to determine whether they are genuine or part of what the company believes is a racist or sexist trolling campaign of the series.

On Metacritic, which aggregates reviews of music albums, video games, movies, and television shows, the series has a rating of 2.4, with 1,359 users giving negative reviews.

“There’s little of Tolkien in this ‘Tolkien epic’. The acting is dire and even laughable throughout. The story, or lack thereof, is a convoluted, nonsensical mess. The characters have been butchered and are now rendered unlikable and unrecognisable. The filming is amateur at best, with digital halo and make-up clearly visible. The costumes look like they came from a budget fancy dress shop. A disgraceful bastardisation of Tolkien’s legacy,” writes user GreyHaven25.

The series premiered on Amazon over the weekend and has been the talk of the town since its release, with critics and some viewers pretty charmed by the television debut of Middle-Earth, reports Gizmodo.

The two episodes of Lord of the Rings: The Lord of the Rings were watched by more than 25 million viewers worldwide and became the biggest premiere in the history of Prime Video streaming.Amazon Studios head Jennifer Salke heaped praise onto showrunners Patrick McKay and JD Payne, and called the show’s success “fitting that Tolkien’s stories…have led us to this proud moment.”

Amazon is celebrating the series’ success, but has moderated viewer reviews of the show on its streaming service for 72 hours. A representative of the company explained that such a rule was introduced at the beginning of summer, according to The Hollywood Reporter. In this way, Amazon wants to make sure the reviews are legitimate and not part of some racist or sexist trolling scheme, as it has been with the Hulk and Ms. Marvel series.

However, this approach is unlikely to help Amazon improve viewer ratings, and in addition to the drop in ratings on Metacritic, other popular platforms are also not far behind. Rotten Tomatoes user rating of the Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power fell to 39% based on almost 18,000 reviews.

However, as Reddit users noticed, the IMDB service, owned by Amazon, has begun removing negative reviews from viewers, but it’s fair to say that they may have been left by bots, as not all negative comments have been removed. Currently, The Lord of the Rings: The Lord of the Rings has a rating of 6.8 out of 10 on the platform based on over 90,000 reviews. The highest rating of the series was given by more than 29,000 users, and the lowest – by almost 22,000.