About Rotten Tweets

METHODOLOGY & HOW IT WORKS

What is Rotten Tweets?

Rotten Tweets is a sentiment aggregator for movies and TV shows, powered by real posts from X (Twitter). Think of it as a Rotten Tomatoes-style score, but instead of critics, the ratings come from everyday viewers sharing their genuine opinions online. We track what the internet really thinks.

How Scores Are Calculated

Every tweet is classified as positive, negative, or neutral using a three-phase hybrid classifier:

  1. Keyword fast-path — obvious sentiment detected instantly via keyword matching
  2. AI classification — ambiguous tweets analyzed by Claude Haiku for nuanced sentiment
  3. VADER fallback — computational sentiment analysis as a safety net

The final score uses neutral dampening: neutral tweets pull extreme scores toward the center rather than being ignored entirely. This prevents a title with 5 positive and 0 negative tweets (but 100 neutral) from showing as 100% — the large neutral pool tempers the result for a more realistic picture.

Rating Tiers

X Certified75%+Overwhelmingly positive sentiment
X Fresh60–74%Generally positive reception
Mixed40–59%Split opinions, no clear consensus
X RottenBelow 40%Predominantly negative sentiment

The Experts Score

Each title page also shows an averaged “Experts” score — a single number combining ratings from IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and TMDB, all normalized to a 0–100 scale. This lets you compare what professional critics think versus what real people on X are saying.

Data Sources

  • Tweets — collected from X (Twitter) in real-time, filtered for spam and irrelevant content
  • Movie & TV metadata — sourced from TMDB
  • Expert ratings — aggregated from IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and TMDB via OMDb
  • Streaming availability — provided by JustWatch via TMDB

Update Frequency

Scores are refreshed on a tiered schedule — popular and recently released titles are updated every 8–24 hours, while older titles are refreshed every 3–7 days. New movies and TV shows are automatically added twice daily from TMDB's trending and now-playing lists.

Disclaimer

Rotten Tweets is an independent project and is not affiliated with Rotten Tomatoes, Twitter/X, IMDb, Metacritic, TMDB, or any movie studio. All trademarks belong to their respective owners. Sentiment scores are algorithmically generated and may not perfectly represent public opinion.