Understanding the Review Bombing Phenomenon in Movies and Television

Abstract

Review bombing, where users post many negative reviews to lower a product’s rating, is a phenomenon that has become an increasingly prevalent problem in the entertainment industry and garnered significant attention in the popular press. These reviews are characterized by inflammatory language over a social, cultural, or political issue related to the product, and are less about the quality of the product itself. Using a dataset of 3232 reviews from Metacritic.com, we find evidence that review-bombed products have a high expert/user score gap, high review polarity, high negative imbalance, and evidence of collective action, compared with a paired set of non-bombed products. Specifically, we find evidence of collective trolling, as bombed product reviews are 20% shorter, but have 83% more negative emotion, 25% more anger, and 130% more controversial words. We provide several avenues for future research on review bombing.