Critics Code of Conduct

AS AN APPROVED CRITIC FOR ROTTEN TOMATOES, WE ASK THAT YOU READ AND OBSERVE THE FOLLOWING STANDARDS AND GUIDELINES:

We expect critics to honor journalistic integrity and uphold publishing ethics. We do not tolerate plagiarism, trolling, discrimination, hate speech, bigotry, or other breaches of conduct across all platforms.

Reviews that are (or in our judgment may be perceived to have been) influenced by a conflict of interest, participation in a prediction market, financial or other incentive are prohibited.

Do not add a review for a movie, TV season, or TV episode you have not seen. Do not add a review to your critic profile under your name if you are not the author of the review.

Do not misattribute your outlet. If you need to update and/or add a new publication to your profile, please reach out to us. It is against our policy to attribute a review to one publication and then link out to a different website than the one indicated.

Do not add more than one review for the same movie, TV season, or TV episode. If you review the same movie/season/episode for multiple outlets, post only one of those reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. If you publish the same reviews in more than one place (ex. originally at a publication and subsequently on your personal blog or website), always default to the publication when posting on Rotten Tomatoes.

Always quote directly from your review. Do not write (or re-write) pull-quotes specifically for RT.

Always link directly to your review. Do not add reviews without links to reviews you have authored.

Brief comments in response to, or published in addition to, a full-length review do not meet our review criteria for inclusion on the Tomatometer, and therefore cannot be added to Rotten Tomatoes.

Most guides, re-caps, festival roundups, best-of, or brief write-ups on what to watch series do not fall under review categories, even if written by a TM approved critic or published in a TM approved publication. For more details, please refer to our Tomatometer Criteria.

We reserve the right to restrict or deny your ability to post reviews and/or remove your Tomatometer approval if you violate our Code of Conduct. This includes, but is not limited to, attempts to manipulate our data in any way, posting of offensive, hateful, or disparaging material, and/or intentionally distorting a movie or TV season/episode score.

Please note that we also reserve the right to add to or change our critic guidelines and Code of Conduct as we see fit, and we may update this document if and when we do.