Wondering if the teeming hoards can weigh in on this…
“Review bombing” is, to my understanding, or possibly misunderstanding, some number of individuals post negative reviews of a creative work having not even actually seen heard or read it, but instead based on a perceived cultural agenda issue. Infamously review bombs of movies that star women but also of books (such as this case in which an author review bombed the works of women of color.) To my understanding these individuals do not need to be conspiring together; each can be acting individually. As was the one with the books, albeit the author created multiple accounts to make it appear like a large number of negative reviews.
So thoughts? Does the phrase require a conspiracy among some number of people?
Does there need to be definite intent to decrease sales and success, or is the response based on perceived cultural agenda creative work unread/unseen/unheard the key feature?
When I hear the term, I always assume multiple negative reviews for the purpose of driving down any sort of review score, not just a single review. That’s what makes it like a bomb—the outsized impact. The reason for said bomb will be some culture war thing or other outrage that is external to the work. (This would include the outrage of their favorite artist not “winning”.) This differentiates it from a bunch of people all disliking the same aspect of a work. The implication is that the review score does not accurately reflect either the critical or audience reception of the work in question.
The guy you described is definitely review bombing because they left multiple reviews. Another method would be some sort of brigading, where multiple people in a likeminded group all leave bad scores after being inspired to do so by some sort of outrage. These need not be coordinated exactly, but they need to be related.
And then the most common form of review bombing involves both–you have both multiple accounts and multiple people. They are likely loosely coordinated, in that they all are fans of multiple talking heads who have stoked outrage about the work in question. Or all being fans of a “competitor” who has convinced them that the other side is artificially inflating the reviews.
But I do agree that a single person can review bomb with multiple accounts. Where I’m shaky is whether an individual review can be a review bomb. It can clearly be part of a review bomb, in aggregate. And maybe if they lie and pretend to have read it, that would be a problem.
But, as I said, the main issue with review bombing is that it causes inaccuracies in the review scoring. If people actually don’t like a work, and don’t do anything to amplify their reach, then you can hardly say they make the score inaccurate.
Certainly, if a person is reviewing a work without having read/watched/heard it, their review will contribute towards making the overall rating less accurate. And even if reviews like that are completely uncoordinated, with each one being essentially random, that’ll still be noise. A few random noise reviews probably won’t make much difference for a work with millions of reviews, but it might for a work with dozens.
My issue there is whether or not reviewing something you haven’t seen is illegitimate, assuming the person is honest and clear about it. People (except critics) don’t consume media they already predict they won’t like. So there’s inherently a positive bias if you insist everyone watch it–even more so if you insist they must watch the whole thing.
I guess you could argue that this is just a baked-in bias in all audience review scores that can’t be overcome, and one that any reader will take into account. In that case, I could see these as “bad faith reviews,” since they didn’t follow the unwritten rules.
Still, I’d be hesitant to call it review bombing if it was a small, negligible number of people who were not actually coordinated or connected in any significant way. It just doesn’t fit the imagery of a person or group of people throwing bombs to try and harm the work in question.
But we aren’t asking people their opinion about a work. We are asking for their review. That’s a different question IMO and should have a different answer. A review that is based on not seeing / reading / consuming the work is not a “review” and should not be mislabeled as such.
The whole point of review scores is to get the opinions of a mass of strangers who each became qualified to offer an opinion by virtue of having experienced the work.
If there was a way to aggregate review scores so as to differentiate reviews from experience versus opinions not from experience, we might have something useful. If of course the reviewers / opinionators could be trusted to respond truthfully as to which category they are in.
A score like “4.8 stars from 5,000 people who’ve seen it, and 0.5 stars from 100,000 people who haven’t seen it and aren’t going to.” would be very useful info. If again it could be reliably sourced.
If we can’t do that much, then ISTM any “review” based on not consuming the work should be discarded by the folks agreggating the data. Somehow.
The alternative, quite predictably, is the utter enshittification of the very idea of public reviews as a mostly-reliable source of info untainted by the self-interest of the content creator and their distributor(s). And therefore as a neutral indicator of the product’s quality plus/minus individual vagaries of taste which would be expected to mostly average out. Leaving a measure of actual merit as the residuum.
I think that Amazon now only allows reviews from people who have actually bought the item. Of course, that still doesn’t guarantee that they’ve actually read (or otherwise used) it, but it’s probably about as good a proxy as we’ll find. It also means that anyone looking to sink a product via review bombs can only do so by buying a bunch of it.
Here is a rather unpleasant Pit thread dealing with what sort of amounts to review bombing kind of. It’s a poster asserting that their opinions of a show they’ve never seen are more valid than other opinions offered by folks who have seen the show in question.
I have no opinion on the merits of either sides’ arguments. I merely bring it up as an example of what happens when “reviewers” have not experienced the thing they’re vehemently opinionating about.
No, but if someone actually bought the item through Amazon, the review has a head note that says “Verified Purchase.”
Amazon Verified Purchase Reviews
Verified Purchase means the reviewer bought or used the item on Amazon, and paid a price available to most Amazon shoppers.
After someone submits a review, we check if they:
Bought or used the item on Amazon;
Paid a price available to most Amazon shoppers.
If we confirm both, we label the review as Verified Purchase.
Reviews without this label can also be helpful. For example, a customer buys an item from a different company, but wants to share their opinion on Amazon.
I recall a phrase for an author back in the mid 2000s. “It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a consensus.”
They aren’t all getting together in shady social media sites and deciding who to bomb that week. But in the course of general discussions of “culture wars”, they’ve all come to a consensus that anything “woke” should be targeted. But their actual actions, including choosing exactly who to target any given day, are all individually motivated. It’s just that there are enough of these trolls to bomb just about everyone that they hate.
I have actually participated in one review bombing, and based solely on that anecdote, I am going with a mix between conspiracy and consensus. Some years ago Kirk Cameron posted on his Facebook page that people should upvote his Christmas movie, and I read about that and how people were reacting, and I went and gave it one star on IMDb.
One thing I can tell you, though, for more than a decade I used to track IMDb scores in a spreadsheet, and before IMDb fixed their approach, some movies would attract tons of ratings, negative or positive, well before they came out. Twilight was the one that stuck in my head, I think there were thousands of zero votes before it released. But some of the Harry Potter movies had just the same in positive votes before they came out. I would say a lot of that was organic, and I don’t think I can put it exactly in either conspiracy or consensus.
Yeah, the existence of previous fan base would distort all these things. If you’re already committed to the franchise, you’re motivated to get out and support it, in hopes that it continues to produce new movies.
In answer to the OP, both organized campaigns and attacks at random can be involved in review bombing.
As an example of the latter (not sure if they can be termed “creative works”), books by convicted pedophile Jerry Sandusky (a semi-autobiography and another on football strategy) have been hit by nasty (and sometimes entertaining) reviews from people who obviously didn’t read them.
“…a report by the Boston Globe outlines the case of Dr. Monique Tello who found that she had been peppered with 100 negative reviews and derogatory comments on a number of physician ratings sites for speaking out in favor of vaccines. None of the people who posted reviews were her patients, and only after she threatened a lawsuit did the websites take down the reviews.”
The speed and intensity of these review bombings have been facilitated by popular antivax Facebook pages with hundreds of thousands of followers. All they have to do is post info about pro-immunization advocates and related links, and mobs are unleashed without any direct exhortations by their leaders.
Maybe, but in some cases, perhaps a rather loose version of conspiracy. Some of these things just come about as a result of social media. Prominent person X opines at length that artistic work Y is garbage; followers of prominent person X independently find their own way to go and spread proxied disdain, regardless whether they have seen work Y or even properly understood person X’s critique of it.
Or, I suppose, positive reviews. This is my understanding, too. Basically, messing with the rating algorithm.
I don’t think you can call posting a text reaction to a movie in a discussion forum “review bombing”, unless possibly the person lies. I can’t see how “I’m not interested in this movie, which I haven’t seen, for the following reasons” could possibly qualify as “review bombing”.
But it’s not exactly the same. At this point, they don’t really need “fomenters”, and the “followers” are really all just doing the same things based on an underlying ruleset, like a school of fish or a flock of birds who all turn at the same time. There isn’t a particular leader, they just all intuitively know the rules about when to turn, and the turn happens.
Sure, if a fundamentally new target is found, a few leaders might need to point a mob in their direction. But as it stands, a lot of this is just automatic now. A remake movie adds a Black character? Attack. A new movie features a strong female lead? Attack. A new movie features Queer characters? Attack.
The review bombing tactic is why there are now some review sites that prohibit you from leaving a review unless you can prove that you have in fact purchased the specific product that you’re critiquing.
I think that’s why rotten tomatoes highlights the results of published movie reviews. You can be reasonably certain those people all watched the movie.