Halle Bailey’s The Little Mermaid is Being ‘Review-Bombed’ Through a Coordinated Racist Campaign

The Little Mermaid, starring Halle Bailey as the black mermaid, is being review-bombed through a coordinated online campaign forcing IMDB to change its rating system. The campaign is reportedly being carried out using online bots.

The website, Internet Movie Database, popularly known as IMDb, is the biggest online movie database in the world, where users rate movies. IMDb said on Wednesday, it is getting ‘unusual voting activity’ on its database.

IMDb said that the site’s “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.”

The Little Mermaid has been getting 39% 1-star ratings (out of 10), which is unusual for the website.

A #NotMyAriel hashtag trended online in the wake of the release of the Disney movie.

Bailey has, however, remained unfazed and said that having a black Mermaid will change perspectives for many people.

“If I would have had a Black mermaid [as a girl], that would have been insane, that would have changed my whole perspective, my whole life, my confidence, my self-worth. You’re able to see a person who looks like you, when you’re young? Some people are just like, ‘oh, it’s whatever’, because they’ve had it their whole life. It’s nothing to them. But it’s so important.”