By Aruliniyan Mahalingam
JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — Sinhala nationalist Facebook pages in Sri Lanka mounted a campaign to drive down the IMDb rating of "Best of the Best," a new Netflix film starring the Canadian actor Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, according to posts reviewed by Jaffna Monitor. The pages instructed followers to rate the film one star, branded the actor a supporter of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and in one case supplied a prompt for artificial intelligence tools to write reviews attacking her performance.
The backlash began in the days before the film's Sept. 18 release, when video clips spread in which Ms. Ramakrishnan, 24, described herself as "a Tamil Eelam woman" and explained why she does not call herself Sri Lankan. The attacks intensified after TIME published an interview on the day of release describing the Eelam Tamil identity she brought to her role.
The campaign was spearheaded by The Sri COM, a Sinhala-language Facebook page with more than 150,000 followers, which urged its audience to give the film one-star ratings and encouraged followers to post negative reviews. The effort was subsequently amplified by other pages and accounts, including Vikka 2.0, which has about 45,000 followers. Jaffna Monitor identified several accounts involved in the campaign with a combined following of more than 500,000, though those reviewed represent only a portion of the activity.
The Sri COM gave the most detailed instructions. It told followers to feed a prepared prompt into ChatGPT or Google's Gemini, paste the resulting review onto IMDb, and post screenshots as proof. When the film's rating fell, the page thanked participants as "true Sri Lankans." It then proposed doing the same to another film in which Ms. Ramakrishnan appears.
Jaffna Monitor found no statement by Ms. Ramakrishnan expressing support for the L.T.T.E., the separatist group the Sri Lankan military defeated in 2009.
Jaffna Monitor reviewed and archived the posts and comments cited in this article. Quotations from Sinhala-language material were translated by Jaffna Monitor.
The clips
The first wave of anger followed two videos that circulated in the days before the release.
The first was an episode of "Hasan Minhaj Does Not Know," a podcast hosted by the comedian Hasan Minhaj, who co-wrote the film. It was posted on Sept. 16 and featured Ms. Ramakrishnan and her co-star, Priyanka Kedia. Mr. Minhaj told her she had brought "so much of your Tamil Sri Lankan heritage to the script." He said she had "insisted that Maya was the most Sri Lankan," and that he and his co-writer, Prashanth Venkataramanujam, had reworked the script around her notes.
"I love who I am as a Tamil Eelam woman," Ms. Ramakrishnan said on the podcast. "I love my family and my cultural history." Using an expletive, she described herself as emphatically Tamil. She said she could not speak Tamil fluently and was trying to learn, "but that doesn't take away my Tamilness." She also said she cried on set while filming a kuthu, a Tamil folk dance, and described the scene as another glass ceiling broken "as Tamil people."
In a separate video clip, she spoke directly about her national identity. She said that describing herself as a Sri Lankan Tamil was "not truly how I feel about my identity." She said she was glad the film had given her character the exact words she wanted: "I'm Tamil. My family's from Sri Lanka."
People from families like hers across the diaspora, she said, would understand the difference between calling oneself Sri Lankan and saying one's family comes from Sri Lanka. "They know exactly the distinction," she said. She added that the line was a "great way to show people not all South Asians are from India."
In neither video did she mention the L.T.T.E. Sinhala nationalist pages nonetheless shared the clips with captions accusing her of rejecting Sri Lanka and sympathizing with the L.T.T.E. Her remark about India also drew abuse from some Indian social media users.
The TIME interview
TIME published its interview on Sept. 18, the day the film began streaming on Netflix. Directed by Lena Khan and written by Mr. Minhaj and Mr. Venkataramanujam, the film follows two childhood friends who join a competitive Bollywood-fusion dance team at U.C.L.A.
The magazine described Ms. Ramakrishnan as bringing a "very specific Eelam Tamil identity" to the role of Maya and reported that the filmmakers had written that identity into the character. TIME reported that her family comes from Sri Lanka rather than the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and that she does not identify as Sri Lankan. It linked that position to her family's experience of war and displacement.
Ms. Ramakrishnan told the magazine that most viewers would register only that Maya is Tamil. "But I think the Tamil Eelam folks, like yourself, will catch that," she said to her interviewer, Radheyan Simonpillai, who is of Sri Lankan Tamil origin.
TIME reported that as a child she went with her parents, whom it described as activists, to demonstrations in Toronto. The demonstrators called for a ceasefire and for an end to what they called genocide in Sri Lanka. The magazine said that last year she carried a sign reading "Never Have I Ever Thought Genocide Was OK" at a "No Tyrants" rally in Vancouver. Mr. Minhaj told TIME that her parents were "incredible activists and academics" and that she understood her "political and social place in history."
Her position is not new. In a 2019 interview, when she was 17, she said Canada was her country, Tamil was her culture, and that she did not consider herself Sri Lankan.
Some of the most charged language in the TIME article was the writer's, not hers. The magazine wrote that the Sri Lankan state "stands accused" of genocide against Eelam Tamils. It compared her family calling itself Sri Lankan to a Palestinian identifying as Israeli. Neither characterization appears in her quoted remarks.
Successive Sri Lankan governments have rejected accusations of genocide. A 2015 investigation by the United Nations human rights office found patterns of grave violations by both government forces and the L.T.T.E., particularly in the final months of the war. The investigation said these could amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity if established by a court, and it made no determination on genocide. In Canada, where Ms. Ramakrishnan was born and raised, the House of Commons passed a motion in 2022 recognizing May 18 as Tamil Genocide Remembrance Day. The Sri Lankan government condemned the decision.
A wider campaign
The TIME interview gave the pages new material. Within hours of its publication, posts combining quotes from the article with earlier video clips circulated on Sinhala nationalist pages on Facebook.
The posts repeated the same themes. They cast her rejection of a Sri Lankan identity as a betrayal and presented her Eelam Tamil identification as proof of loyalty to the L.T.T.E. Many directed followers to the film's IMDb page and told them to rate it one star.
The Sri COM
The Sri COM's posts set out the campaign's methods most fully. In its first post about the film, the page described Ms. Ramakrishnan as a supporter of “LTTE terrorists” and urged as many of its followers as possible to give the film a one-star rating.
The page then told followers who wanted to write reviews that they could have ChatGPT or Gemini do it for them, and supplied the prompt. Written in English, the prompt asked for a review of more than 300 characters arguing that Ms. Ramakrishnan's "overacting and terrible acting" made the film hard to watch. Followers were told to paste the result onto IMDb and post screenshots on the page to show they had taken part.
The instructions did not require participants to watch the film. The page prescribed both the score and the criticism in advance, while the software generated text that could be presented as an individual viewer’s review.
Hours later, the page announced that the rating had fallen to 5.5. It credited its followers and other Sri Lankans for the drop and thanked them as "true Sri Lankans." The page also claimed that 94 percent of the film's one-star ratings came from Sri Lanka, a figure Jaffna Monitor could not independently verify.
In comments under its posts, The Sri COM proposed targeting "The Angry Birds Movie 3," in which Ms. Ramakrishnan voices a character. The page wrote that the larger film mattered more, and that reviews linking it to allegations of "terrorist support" would cause greater damage.
IMDb says it calculates its displayed score as a weighted average designed to limit the effect of unusual voting activity, but it does not disclose how the weighting works.
Abuse and dissent
The hostility spread into the comment sections of posts about the actor and the film. Commenters mocked her rejection of a Sri Lankan identity. One wrote "404 country name not found worldwide," and another called the film "A girl without a country." Other comments contained misogynistic abuse, which Jaffna Monitor is not reproducing.
Memes shared across several pages linked Ms. Ramakrishnan to Velupillai Prabhakaran, the L.T.T.E. leader killed by Sri Lankan forces in May 2009. Some imitated photographs of his body circulated after his death.
Not all Sinhala-speaking users joined in. In the same threads, some commenters objected to the review bombing. One argued that an actor's political views should be kept separate from judgments about the films she appears in.
A contested term
The dispute turns partly on the word "Eelam." Many Tamils, particularly in diaspora communities formed by people who fled the war, use "Eelam Tamil" to describe an ethnic and regional identity rooted in the Tamil-majority north and east of Sri Lanka. For many Sinhalese, "Tamil Eelam" is bound up with the L.T.T.E. and its armed campaign for a separate state.
The L.T.T.E. began its armed campaign against the Sri Lankan state in the 1970s, carrying out attacks and assassinations before the conflict escalated into full-scale civil war in 1983. It fought the military until its defeat in 2009, when Ms. Ramakrishnan was 7. During the conflict, the group carried out suicide bombings and assassinations and killed Tamil political rivals, civilians, and members of the security forces.
In the war's final months, United Nations investigators and human rights groups accused the L.T.T.E. of grave abuses against Tamil civilians under its control. The accusations included forcibly recruiting adults and children, preventing civilians from fleeing its shrinking territory, and shooting at some who tried to escape. The group also carried out a suicide bombing at a government reception center for civilians who had fled the fighting.
Canada designated the L.T.T.E. a terrorist entity in 2006. The group is also banned in the United States, the European Union and India.
Using "Eelam Tamil" as a self-description does not by itself indicate support for the group. The material reviewed by Jaffna Monitor shows that Ms. Ramakrishnan identifies as an Eelam Tamil, rejects a Sri Lankan national identity, and has taken part in protests over the treatment of Tamils. It contains no statement of support for the L.T.T.E.
