Brigading
Organizing a group to descend on a target at once, with replies, reports, downvotes, or reviews, so that the target is silenced, buried, or driven off by sheer coordinated volume.
Platforms are built for individuals and cannot tell a mob from a crowd. Brigading exploits that: a call goes out in one place, a forum, a channel, a group chat, and hundreds of accounts arrive at another to flood a thread, mass-report a post until the automated system removes it, drive a rating to one star, or fill a critic's mentions until they leave. The target experiences a spontaneous public verdict; the public sees ratings and comment counts that look like judgment.
It is the digital form of the organized heckle, and its effects are measurable: the removed post, the collapsed score, the silenced account. Massanari's study of the 2014 Gamergate campaign described the mechanics; game and film platforms redesigned their review systems to resist it. Exploits Social Proof and the platforms' trust in volume.
Historical examples
The Gamergate campaign coordinated in forums and chat channels to flood the accounts of women game developers and critics with abuse, to mass-report their posts, and to pressure advertisers. Massanari's analysis of the platform dynamics described how a site's design, upvotes, anonymity, and weak moderation, made it "a fertile ground" for the device.
Massanari, Adrienne. "#Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit's Algorithm, Governance, and Culture Support Toxic Technocultures." New Media & Society 19, no. 3 (2017): 329–346. Source
Human-rights and press-freedom organizations have documented coordinated mass-reporting campaigns that trigger automated removal of journalists' and activists' accounts on major platforms, with the reports organized in closed groups. The platforms' own transparency reports acknowledge the tactic and the reinstatements that follow appeals.
Committee to Protect Journalists. "Coordinated Mass Reporting Used to Silence Journalists Online." 2020; Meta. Adversarial Threat Report, Q1 2022, on "mass reporting" networks.
In advertising and commerce
Coordinated "review bombing" of games on Steam over decisions unrelated to the games, and of films on aggregator sites before release, led both Steam in 2017 and Rotten Tomatoes in 2019 to change their systems: Steam added review histograms and later excluded off-topic bursts from scores; Rotten Tomatoes removed pre-release audience ratings. Each change was an admission that volume had been faking judgment.
Valve Corporation. "User Reviews Revisited." Steam Blog, 19 September 2017; Fandango. "Rotten Tomatoes Audience Rating Update." 26 February 2019.
Find a film, game, or book whose rating collapsed suddenly. Look at the dates of the negative reviews and what they say. Do they look like people who used it?
In the wild
Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.
A restaurant's rating fell from 4.6 to 1.8 overnight after a post in a political group named it; the new reviews mention no food.
What to notice. Coordinated arrivals from elsewhere overwhelm the rating; the content of the reviews reveals it.
The researcher's post was removed by the platform's automated system after 900 reports in twenty minutes; on appeal it was restored.
What to notice. Mass reporting weaponizes the platform's own moderation against the target.
"Everyone in the channel: go to her thread and let her know what we think." Four hundred replies followed.
What to notice. An organized descent on one target from a coordinating space.
Sources
- Massanari, Adrienne. "#Gamergate and The Fappening." New Media & Society 19, no. 3 (2017): 329–346. doi:10.1177/1461444815608807
- Phillips, Whitney. This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. ISBN 978-0262529877
- Citron, Danielle Keats. Hate Crimes in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0674368293