Down with Disney: The alt-right group trying to sabotage Black Panther

Facebook has removed the page of a far-right group which planned to ruin the online rating of the Black Panther movie.

A group called Down with Disney's Treatment of Franchises and Its Fanboys planned to mobilise its followers online to sabotage the audience score on the popular film website Rotten Tomatoes.

The audience rating is calculated using the scores a film receives from the general public. Low ratings are believed to affect a movie's chances of box office success.

So who are the group, and what exactly happened?

The group was led by a self-identified member of the so-called alt-right movement, according to Variety.

The group created an event called "Give Black Panther a Rotten Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes". More than 4,000 people had registered their apparent support by clicking "interested" or "going" on the event page before it was shut down on Sunday, Mail Online reported.

On the page, organisers claimed that they had already used bots to skew the rating of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, a film noted for its relatively diverse cast, on Rotten Tomatoes. While critics had given it a 91% "fresh rating" when it hit movie screens in December, viewers appeared to rate it a surprisingly low 45%.

"I feel that it's time to strike back at all those under Disney and bring down the house of mouse's actions for paying off the critics that hurt DC Comics on film and for other parties affected by them," the organiser wrote on the event page.

"I'll be making events like this for Infinity War and the Netflix shows etc so we can rally together to truly make a difference. Share this with your friends and all potential sympathizers."

How have people responded?

After Facebook banned the group, Rotten Tomatoes released a statement. It said it was "proud to have become a platform for passionate fans to debate and discuss entertainment and we take that responsibility seriously".

It added: "While we respect our fans' diverse opinions, we do not condone hate speech. Our team of security, network and social experts continue to closely monitor our platforms and any users who engage in such activities will be blocked from our site and their comments removed as quickly as possible."

Black Panther director Ryan Coogler told HuffPost: "I'm looking forward to everybody seeing the film. I'm really looking forward to sharing the film with audiences, regardless of what their political views are."

He added that the Rotten Tomatoes scores could be "an oversimplification of what critics are saying about a movie".