Review bombing the platformed city: Contested political speech in online local reviews
Abstract
Local review platforms like Yelp and Google Maps use systems combining automated and human judgment to delineate the limits of acceptable speech, allowing some reviews to remain public and removing or obscuring others. This article examines the phenomenon of “review bombing,” in which controversial businesses receive an influx of reviews, using spatiotemporal analysis of review activity to analyze their shifting catchment areas, measuring what sociologist Richard Ocejo calls the “extraterritoriality” of their “taste communities”. Specifically, this article examines businesses in the United States that are caught up in political controversies using the locations of their consumer-reviewers on Yelp. The author compiles a test dataset of affected businesses encompassing national and local politics, including the 2016 and 2020 U.S. elections, the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements, and the COVID-19 pandemic, and selects two for in-depth case studies and spatial analysis: Washington, D.C.-based pizzeria Comet Ping Pong (subject of the #Pizzagate conspiracy theory) and St. Louis-based Pi Pizzeria (caught up in debates about policing and the Black Lives Matter movement). In Comet Ping Pong’s case, review bombing resulted in a wider spatial distribution of primarily negative reviewers, while Pi has a much more local pattern, with a fairly even split of supporters and detractors, showing how different political controversies resonate across different scales. The article contrasts Yelp’s interventionist approach to content moderation to the relatively laissez-faire attitude of competitors like Google, and considers the consequences of this form of “algorithmic censorship” for small businesses, communities, and online speech.
Citation
Payne, W. B. (2024). Review bombing the platformed city: Contested political speech in online local reviews. Big Data & Society, 11(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241275879
