THE POLARISING EFFECT OF REVIEW BOMBING

This study discusses the Review Bomb, a phenomenon consisting of a massive attack by groups of Internet users on a website that displays users' review on products. It gained attention, especially on websites that aggregate numerical ratings. Although this phenomenon can be considered an example of online misinformation, it differs from conventional spam review, which happens within larger time spans. In particular, the Bomb occurs suddenly and for a short time, because in this way it leverages the notorious problem of cold-start: if reviews are submitted by a lot of fresh new accounts, it makes hard to justify preventative measures. The present research work is focused on the case of The Last of Us Part II, a video game published by Sony, that was the target of the widest phenomenon of Review Bomb, occurred in June 2020. By performing an observational analysis of a linguistic corpus of English reviews and the features of its users, this study confirms that the Bomb was an ideological attack aimed at breaking down the rating system of the platform Metacritic. Evidence supports that the bombing had the unintended consequence to induce a reaction from users, ending into a consistent polarisation of ratings towards extreme values. The results not only display the theory of polarity in online reviews, but them also provide insights for the research on the problem of cold-start detection of spam review. In particular, it illustrates the relevance of detecting users discussing contextual elements instead of the product and users with anomalous features.