Rise of the Review Bomb
by Annalee Newitz
In the fall of 2003 the presidential race was heating up, and a new wave of hacktivists was chipping away at incumbent George W. Bush’s online reputation all over the internet. Which is why, if you were to Google the phrase “miserable failure” around that time, Bush’s official White House biography would pop up in the top spot.
Bush had ascended to the presidency only through a highly questionable boost from the Supreme Court, which had put an end to the counting of votes in Florida—basically awarding him the state, and with it the White House. Though many would continue to see Bush’s presidency as illegitimate, the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11 saw his Gallup approval ratings shoot up to around 90 percent, the highest ever recorded for a U.S. president. By the fall of 2003, a few months after his administration invaded Iraq, that number had dropped by half, and tempers were high.
The architect of this cyber-feat of search manipulation, using the technique known as a “Google bomb,” was a software engineer named George Johnston. A liberal blogger who worked at a rival search company, Johnston knew quite a bit about how to mess with search algorithms. Plus, he told me via DM, it helped that Google used to publicly reveal which websites were given the most weight in the PageRank algorithm that determined search results. Armed with this knowledge, Johnston and other prominent bloggers were able to manipulate the algorithm as a form of political protest.
Though right-wing influencers attempted countermeasures, and tried to make Jimmy Carter and Michael Moore the top result for the words “miserable failure,” they failed. George W. Bush was associated with “miserable failure” in Google search results until 2007, when the company changed its algorithm to unseat it. Nowadays, a search for “miserable failure” returns a top link to the history of Google bombing, as well as articles about Johnston’s hack. Sadly, it does not link to the current resident of the White House, nor is it ever likely to again.
Still, Johnston’s Google bomb brought new weapons to the culture wars, as well as a new suffix, much as Watergate gave us Pizzagate and Gamergate.
You’ve probably seen one of these bombs by now. A group of angry customers flooded a restaurant platform to pan a wine bar because the owner was mean to an influencer. That’s a Yelp bomb. Thousands of anti-woke Lord of the Rings fans battered Amazon with 1-star ratings for its Rings of Power series, because the streamer had cast Black people as elves and dwarves. And that’s an Amazon bomb.
No matter the target, the goal of a review bomb is the same: to dramatically lower a product or person’s ratings and reputation in order to cause damage. The impetus may be to call attention to an injustice, harm a competitor, or stoke racial or political hatred.
Like many weapons in the culture war, the review bomb sometimes... bombs. But though it doesn’t always work, at times it gives a tiny group of angry dipshits an outsized influence. Review bombings can shutter a business, sink a career, drive people out of the public sphere, or even foment violence. Bombers often target marginalized groups, making these attacks a stochastic version of the Lavender Scare or Jim Crow.
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