The future of dissent isn’t just playing out in city streets or legislative halls, against Flock cameras, or data centers, or would-be kings. It’s being negotiated, and often negated, in digital consumer spaces and the platforms that make them possible, thanks in large part to the explosive and controversial nature of review bombing.

Through vague policies and promises of eliminating harm, platforms have responded to review bombing by breaking up digital channels of dissent to ensure smoother consumer experiences. But meaningful dissent is still possible, if we hold platforms—and ourselves—more accountable for nurturing it.

Not all engagement is equal

Platforms thrive on engagement. They prize consumers who feel a sense of agency when they buy things, and they love what they learn about them in the process. It is part of the promise of social commerce: that the sweeping, industrialized translation of everyday life into data trades a modicum of privacy for a consumption-based power that was once impossible. We as consumers have a profound voice, they say, a direct line to the companies that shape our lives.

But review bombing shows that not all engagement is equal. Despite platforms’ increasing ease with hosting harmful and manipulative content, despite reductions in fact-checking and content moderation, platforms have drawn a line at the collective use of negative reviews to “bomb” a product’s score and protest its maker.

Nearly all platforms that host consumer reviews—from Google and Amazon to Rotten Tomatoes and Steam—have instituted new policies to govern reviews in response to the growth of review bombing in the last decade. By classifying review bombing as “inauthentic” or “manipulative,” threatening to ban users for engaging in it, and altering interface designs to hide it, platforms claim to protect companies and consumers alike from misbehaving and toxic users who abuse platforms to manipulate reviews.

However, distinguishing between social protest and review bombing has always been partly a matter of perspective. For example, attacking a movie’s review score because its female lead spoke out about a press pool dominated by male journalists seems obviously odious. But what about leaving bad reviews for businesses because of their owners’ politics or stances on social issues? For some people, knowledge of labor practices or political expenditures has no bearing on how they appreciate their devices or enjoy their food; but for others, problems like worker exploitation or environmental harms determine which shirts they will or will not wear. For them, protest through review bombing is not as black-and-white an issue as platforms would like us to believe.

Review policies conflate dissent with harm

Review bombing calls attention to unresolved tensions in social commerce and democracy at large, and there is no easy clarity to be found regarding divisions between dissent and harm. The difficulty lies in trying to divorce our experiences as consumers from our lives as citizens. As I have argued in my own research, because consumption is inherently political, so is review bombing. Platforms cannot determine for their users what does or doesn’t actually matter when they engage with companies and their products.

Platforms that host reviews can only attempt to curtail certain behaviors, encourage others, and design interfaces and policies to support them. The nature of social commerce and the omnipresent product rating is that there is a tendency not to discern between political, collective contention and abuse or misinformation. For instance, in 2019, Valve Corporation’s gaming platform Steam moderated a series of review bombing campaigns that protested game developers’ exclusivity deals with a competing platform as anti-consumer. And in 2021, Google removed roughly 100,000 reviews for the Robinhood trading app that protested the app’s intervention in Reddit-driven stock trading.

Rather, platforms distinguish between friction and smoothness, and they judge each according to the ease of commercial engagement. Review bombing creates friction by changing the terms of that engagement to being about topics that companies would rather remain invisible and unspoken. And some critics argue that review bombing also challenges or confuses consumers—if they question it at all—while contributing to a breakdown in online trust.

In platforms’ policies, any behavior that causes friction collapses into misbehavior and a target for governance. Harms like toxicity, abuse, and mis- and disinformation actually exist, and they need continued attention. However, the governance steps that platforms have taken with regard to reviews do little to differentiate dissent from harmful behavior and provide little benefit to public discourse.

How platforms govern review bombing

Platforms have largely followed one of two courses of action in response to review bombing.

The first is to eliminate the review mechanism or its visibility. YouTube infamously hid the number of dislikes for videos (only “like” totals can be seen) after considering the removal of dislikes entirely, while Rotten Tomatoes has made several changes, including the removal of pre-release anticipation ratings for movies. Metacritic has also eliminated user reviews for new video games for 36 hours after their release. These actions make collective dissent much more difficult, since consumers either cannot participate or cannot see the participation of others.

The second course of action is to adopt opaque mechanisms and policies for moderation and display of reviews. These effectively leave it up to the platform’s discretion to curate reviews that it finds problematic. Google and Amazon, for instance, refer to the problem vaguely as “rating manipulation” or “inauthentic content.” Both platforms reserve the right to delete reviews and remove offending users from their platforms, though they present no clear criteria for how or when these punishments would be applied.

Steam calls review bombing “off-topic activity” made by “unhelpful” reviewers. Through a combination of algorithm-based analysis and human oversight, neither of which is explained, periods of review activity are walled off by default from consumers, though they can change this setting for themselves. Additionally, Steam presents histograms, search features, and asterisked warnings to guide consumers around such “activity.” While more permissive than Google or Amazon, Steam’s policies focus on diminishing the communicative potential of review bombing while keeping its practitioners engaged with the platform.

These actions only address review bombing as a problem devoid of social context. By applying vague definitions to complicated situations, platforms are far more likely to categorize dissenting speech as harmful. While the intent may not be to actively hinder dissent, it certainly errs on the side of protecting companies and the free flow of consumption.

Undoubtedly, vagueness is partly a strategy to defeat attempts to circumvent these policies. However, for dissent to survive, it needs either clear boundaries around which it can flow, or more permissive boundaries that are likely to pass it through. Current review policies provide neither.

If platforms can point to instances of review bombing being motivated by sexism, racism, or inter-fandom squabbles, they find less resistance from consumers when they take steps toward blunting the impact of this kind of digital collective action. In doing so, platforms set the terms for how we think about dissent, shifting it from a necessary component of citizens’ lives to an obstacle to fulfilling consumers’ desires.

We can imagine a future with meaningful dissent

Despite encroaching autocratization and the increased targeting of dissent around the world, there is still hope for the nurturing and maintenance of dissent in the future. Dissent should be welcomed, even by those in power. It tests supposed consensus and dares us to be better, even if we disagree with it. Especially as many tech companies and their leaders continue to warm up to autocratic actors and their desires, we need to protect any method of communication that could unite people and spread messages of constructive dissent.

By the nature of private media ownership, digital dissent will always be precarious. However, we can better safeguard digital dissent by continuing to push platforms for transparency about their governance decisions, so that the public can have better understanding, if not a say, in how their speech is being curtailed in “private” platform spaces.

Platforms also need to make more of an effort to distinguish between harmful speech and useful speech: imprecise labels like “off-topic” depend on an impossible foreclosure of what it means to experience the politics of consumption. As such, they are far more protective of companies than consumers.

Finally, platforms and the public need to rethink what it means to be a consumer and what space we must make for dissent in our everyday lives. Together, we can better hold companies—and each other—accountable for the world we’re creating for ourselves and each other. Dissent, even in the form of review bombing, is a powerful tool for the public good. Let’s not throw it away with clumsy and uncritical governance.