Bullying in Online Reviews: Investigating the Reaction to Extremely Negative Reviews
type: CreativeWork
description: In online review websites, people exchange information about the products and services by posting an online review. People can read the information from posts as well as leave other reviews to interact and communicate with reviewers in the websites. This interaction allows people to exchange their opinion randomly. Because of this, online reviews become crucial for people and business. Many researches have been conducted to study the effects of online reviews. Some scholars pay attention to the style of the review including interpersonal tie, altruism or continuum and valence of emotion. However, there is little research available yet that sheds light on the extremely negative style of online reviews. This extremely negative style of review is a special form of bullying. The lack of research into bullying reviews is a gap that provides an opportunity to investigate how people react to an extremely negative review. The purpose of this research is to investigate the reaction of people on the extremely negative style of reviews (bullying). Thus a 2 size (power) of the victim (small local company vs. big international company) by 2 position of the bully (consumer profile (user) vs. expert profile) by 2 level of bullying (negative review vs. bullying review) is employed to investigate the research question. This research is approved by AUTEC and the ethics application number is 14/164 Negative bullying of brands in online reviews on 27 May 2014. Our result illustrates that the bullying review is not accepted among audiences who consume the online review as a source of information. Moreover, when the reviewers write reviews in the bullying style, their trustworthiness and expertise level seems to be evaluated negatively. This maybe because the bullying style of review blocks the freedom of audiences in achieving their goals. The research also found evidence that people do not like to see the reviewer attack the weak victim such as a small company. Furthermore, it is even …
abstract: In online review websites, people exchange information about the products and services by posting an online review. People can read the information from posts as well as leave other reviews to interact and communicate with reviewers in the websites. This interaction allows people to exchange their opinion randomly. Because of this, online reviews become crucial for people and business. Many researches have been conducted to study the effects of online reviews. Some scholars pay attention to the style of the review including interpersonal tie, altruism or continuum and valence of emotion. However, there is little research available yet that sheds light on the extremely negative style of online reviews. This extremely negative style of review is a special form of bullying. The lack of research into bullying reviews is a gap that provides an opportunity to investigate how people react to an extremely negative review. The purpose of this research is to investigate the reaction of people on the extremely negative style of reviews (bullying). Thus a 2 size (power) of the victim (small local company vs. big international company) by 2 position of the bully (consumer profile (user) vs. expert profile) by 2 level of bullying (negative review vs. bullying review) is employed to investigate the research question. This research is approved by AUTEC and the ethics application number is 14/164 Negative bullying of brands in online reviews on 27 May 2014. Our result illustrates that the bullying review is not accepted among audiences who consume the online review as a source of information. Moreover, when the reviewers write reviews in the bullying style, their trustworthiness and expertise level seems to be evaluated negatively. This maybe because the bullying style of review blocks the freedom of audiences in achieving their goals. The research also found evidence that people do not like to see the reviewer attack the weak victim such as a small company. Furthermore, it is even …
author: Bouaaphone, Souvantha
keywords: Bullying, Online, Reviews, Reaction, Extremely, Negative, Investigating
date published: 2015
date modified: 2026-07-27T18:46:20Z
provider: AUT University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: AUT University