Fan Bombing (Review Bombing)

​What Is Fan Bombing?

Fan bombing is a coordinated effort by an online community, fanbase, or any other organised group to artificially influence public perception of a person, brand, product, service, team, institution, or piece of content through mass engagement activities. These activities may include posting reviews, comments, ratings, reactions, recommendations, social media posts, or other forms of user-generated content within a short period of time.

Fan bombing can be either negative or positive. While some campaigns aim to damage a target's reputation through criticism and negative reviews, others seek to inflate popularity, ratings, or public sentiment with coordinated praise. These campaigns often start from social media platforms, messaging applications, and digital communities. In some cases, fan bombing can be used as a part of brandjacking activity. But not necessary: brandjacking is more about business, fan bombing is more often connected with individual positive or negative reactions. Fans want to make their favourite content or team more popular, or create a negative image of ones they don't like. 

Fan bombing creates an artificial representation of public opinion; so, it can change audience perception, influence platform algorithms, and complicate efforts to measure real audience attitude.

Fan Bombing Impact

Fan bombing can significantly change how brands, public figures, products, and organisations are perceived online. Coordinated campaigns may create the illusion of widespread support or opposition and influence potential audiences, clients, and partners.

The impact of fan bombing:

* Manipulated public perception and reputation

* Artificial influence on metrics

* Reputational challenges, a decrease in audience loyalty

* Misinformation 

* Difficulties in distinguishing real audience reactions and opinions from coordinated ones

How Fan Bombing Works

Fan bombing typically begins when an online community, fan group, activist movement, or coordinated network identifies a target they wish to promote or oppose. Organisers encourage participants to engage simultaneously across digital platforms using reviews, comments, reactions, shares, hashtags, recommendations, or direct interactions. It can be just one participant who is active; also, one initiator can organise fan bombing technically by sending messages or comments from bots.

During the fan bombing, participants may flood social media discussions, review platforms, community chats, messaging channels, and other digital environments with coordinated comments and messages to influence visibility and public opinion. This can create a misleading picture of public sentiment and affect the reputation of the targeted brand.

Fan bombing in various domains

For the art and cultural sphere, the most popular variant of fan bombing is review bombing. For example, in gaming, the popular case happened with  The Last of Us Part II (2020). Following its 2020 release, The Last of Us Part II was targeted by a large-scale campaign across gaming platforms. The incident is widely cited as an example of how coordinated online communities can rapidly influence public perception and user ratings of a product.

With films, it happens quite often: when fans don't like the case or any other news about film production. With negative reviews and ratings, try to change the digital image of the film. It happened with Captain Marvel (2019). Also, low-quality films or series can get automated grades and reviews to create an image of a more successful release.

In sports community chats, fan bombing can simulate the support of the specific team, for example. Also, users can just create a flooding, uncomfortable environment to prevent real users, supporters of the team or club, from leaving the platform with no communication.

How to protect a brand from fan bombing

For internal communities, moderation remains the best protection against fan bombing. Community rules, local admins, and options for users to report strange behaviour are necessary, along with AI moderation tools that block floods and repetitive messages. This protects the community from users attempting fan bombing. To guard against automated campaigns using bots, MFA helps by preventing the creation of artificial accounts and bots.

Read about community moderation strategies: how to build it to protect the digital community from manipulative activities