THE POLARISING EFFECT OF REVIEW BOMBING APREPRINT Venera Tomaselli Giulio G. Cantone Department of Political and Social Sciences Department of Physics and Astronomy "Ettore Majorana" University of Catania University of Catania
[email protected] [email protected] Valeria Mazzeo Department of Physics and Astronomy "Ettore Majorana" University of Catania
[email protected] April 5, 2021 ABSTRACT 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.