Abstract
Platforms often serve as sites for practices of political consumerism, and exposure to news and political content through platforms can lead to increased engagement in such practices as boycotting and buycotting. However, platforms regularly intervene, visibly and invisibly, with the goings-on among their users, favoring their own techno-commercial logics. This critical analysis explores this tension between platforms and consumer protesters, asking how platforms relate to political consumerism through how they problematize and govern its practices. Using a governmentality lens, I focus on the case of review bombing on the video game platform Steam, arguing that the practice serves as an informal participation in politics that has been problematized by Steam as a social wrong within its population of users. Combining an analysis of Steam's public and developer-oriented policy documents with a critical walkthrough of its user review system, I explain how Steam has modified its platform affordances and discourses to directly and indirectly encourage a “helpful” consumer identity for its users while simultaneously depoliticizing reviews, games, and consumerism as a whole. This ongoing process, a discursive negotiation between platform governors and the governed, reveals not only the tenuous nature and future of political consumerism on platforms but also concerns for the increasing disparity in how segments of society conceive of power relations—and how they desire their change.
Keywords
Introduction
In 2013, the Steam digital gaming platform, owned by Valve Corporation, introduced a user review system to help users “see what other … users think about a product before [they] buy” (Steam, n.d.). This review system has been coopted periodically by users to engage in review bombing in order to protest perceived social, political, and economic wrongdoing related to games and their development. For instance, in early April 2016, many users wrote reviews to protest the inclusion of a transgender character in Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, generating counter-reviews and discourse about representation in media, LGBTQ rights and experiences, and the nature of political and hate speech (Grayson, 2016). In January and February 2019, users protested Metro Exodus publisher Deep Silver's decision to make that game temporarily exclusive to a different digital storefront by review bombing other games in the Metro series already available on Steam. This in turn generated discourse about business and “anti-consumer” practices in the digital games industry (Chalk, 2019).
A similar situation occurred in early April 2019 with the Borderlands franchise after the developer announced that the third game would be temporarily exclusive to the same digital storefront as Metro Exodus: previous entries in the series were review-bombed on Steam. What differentiates the Borderlands case, however, is that it occurred after Steam changed its review system to mitigate the effects of review bombing (TomB, 2019). Although Steam still explicitly condones the use of reviews for purposes of protest (Steamworks, n.d.), and users continue to protest through review bombing, Steam's changes threaten to render such protests invisible. This establishes the review system as a site of tension between users, game developers, publishers, and Steam, where the products of protest are themselves commodified and subsumed within the political economy of a global games market valued at $184 billion (Batchelor, 2023).
Recognizing this tension, the purpose of this study is to understand how the platform Steam responded, and why it responded the way it did, when its users practice review bombing. Platforms regularly intervene in response to undesirable user behavior, such as through content (Gillespie, 2018) and visibility (Zeng and Kaye, 2022) moderation, and users often adapt by withdrawing or self-censoring (Myers West, 2018; Duguay et al., 2020) or even actively contesting policy changes (Sybert, 2022). Yet, people engaged in protest acts like political consumerism regularly do so through the affordances of social media and other online platforms (Boulianne, 2022), a kind of informal participation (Bherer et al., 2023) in politics that regular use of social media platforms tends to foster (Boulianne et al., 2024; Cheng et al., 2023). While studies of political consumerism regularly account for platforms as sites where such practices are enacted, they have yet to fully explore the relationship between how platforms intervene and how political consumerism operates.
This study employs governmentality (Foucault, 1991, 2007; Dean, 2010) as a lens for examining how platforms and political consumerism work with and against each other. Governmentality studies seek to understand the “conduct of conduct,” the direct and indirect ways in which governors encourage and constrain the behavior of the governed, particularly when confronted by some sort of social, political, or economic problem. Such studies favor a relational, holistic approach to understanding power as diffused through multiple dimensions and stakeholders. Review bombing on the Steam platform serves as a case study for exploring the relationship between platforms, their users, and political consumerism, for several key reasons. Review bombing has emerged as a new tactic for consumers to engage in informal political participation, protesting issues they see in games, other media, service industries, and more that are regularly reflected in modern political discourse. Before reviewing bombing's proliferation across commercial products, the practice rose to prominence on Steam, which found itself at the forefront of policy and governance for dealing with a nascent form of political consumerism. Steam's response has been rendered visible by the example of Borderlands 2's review bombing and by its public grappling with the apparent problem and its range of possible solutions. In all, this provides a productive site for critical intervention into developing an understanding of Steam's approach to platform governmentality in relation to practices of political consumerism.
Through my analysis, I argue that Steam illustrates the tensions inherent to platform governmentality in how it navigates supposedly empowered and liberated consumers (Draper, 2012) and the intense data and experience commodification activities of data-centered capitalism (Srnicek, 2016; Zuboff, 2019; Couldry and Mejias, 2019). Steam's user review system functions as its exemplary technology for guiding consumer conduct, promoting personalization and social interaction while teaching consumers the appropriate, productive ways of consuming games. Steam's problematization of review bombing has driven a reconstruction of its interface, user affordances, and discourse to disempower consumers engaged in political consumerism and depoliticize reviews and their issues—avoiding, perhaps artfully, disempowering otherwise “helpful” users in the process. This reconstruction is an ongoing negotiation, as Steam grapples with both its unruly users and its position as an important platform within the video games industry. This relationship highlights the tenuous nature of political consumerism mediated by platforms. It also calls into question the increasingly visible disparity in how segments of our platformized society understand the structuring and diffusion of power—and how they desire it to be.
The governmentality employed by Steam shows how platforms can short-circuit our attempts to protest and engage in collective, if uncoordinated, action. Furthermore, such actions by platforms limit our capacity for public, democratic deliberation. Protests contribute a conflictual, agonistic dimension to a democracy's efforts toward developing a “mutual understanding” through “public conversation” (Mendonça and Ercan, 2015). And yet, platforms’ approaches to governance intercede in this connection, making it harder to meaningfully link the affordances of social media and “everyday talk” to more explicit deliberation about issues in the public sphere (Lundgaard and Etter, 2023). Indeed, Steam's actions seem aligned with what Nyberg and Murray (2023) term “corporate populism,” wherein tactics of depoliticization are promoted and opportunities for deliberation are suppressed in the name of an apolitical common good.
Our public spheres are not so public: we engage within them at the whims of our hosts, platforms like Steam, and we find ourselves constrained not (only) according to shared or disputed norms of conversation, of deliberation, and of democratic discourse, but (also) according to the designs of platform governors, their avarice, their fealties, their fears. In taking a governmentality approach to studying review bombing on Steam, I encourage bracketing of our typical left/right, liberal/illiberal framing when discussing political consumerism, online discourse, and deliberation. Instead, we should see such appeals to ideology as malleable elements of a governmentality that focuses on maintaining an order of power relations beneficial to the platforms and their political-economic interests above anything else.
Platforms and political consumer practice
Despite a history of construing themselves as neutral stages for communication and commerce (Gillespie, 2010), platforms function as “techno-commercial assemblages” with a structural logic of their own for organizing and constraining social interaction, including activism and protest (van Dijck and Poell, 2013). Because of their “technological architectures and business models,” social media accelerate the spread of activist communication before they just as swiftly discard it for something new. Meanwhile, they encourage users to identify and share messages primarily for building profiles that can be sold for advertising (Poell and van Dijck, 2015), part of a larger capitalist system euphemized by industry as “social commerce” and explained by scholars through concepts like platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2016), surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), and data colonialism (Couldry and Mejias, 2019).
Due in large part to their successful reorientation of everyday social life (Couldry and Mejias, 2019), platforms have made for irresistible sites for the practicing of political consumerism. Studies of political consumerism have tended to define the concept largely through identification with boycotts and buycotts. However, Lee and Fong (2023) broaden this definition to a “notion that encompasses not only acts of consumption but also ideas and practices associated with how political and moral views should be integrated with consumer behavior.” Usefully, this definition promotes a relational, holistic approach to understanding how we mix everyday politics with consumption. Other approaches to the combination of politics, activism, and consumption include commodity activism (Banet-Weiser and Mukherjee, 2012). Researchers of commodity activism tend to focus less on practice and more on critical interpretations of commodification and activism, often critiquing the ways in which capitalist discourses and logics make room for activism by commodifying it in turn (e.g. Repo, 2020). Scholars have also noted the myriad methods, large and small, of engaging in everyday acts of resistance through digital media like platforms, which they term “informal participation” in politics and political deliberation (Bherer et al., 2023). In addition to utilizing platforms as spaces for informal political participation, people engaged in political consumerism also actively link their other uses of platforms with the ideals and values related to consumption. For instance, social media use tends to foster further engagement with ideas and practices of political consumerism (Boulianne, 2022; Boulianne et al., 2024; Cheng et al., 2023). Comment sections on social media and other websites also provide counter-public spaces, in which people can express and deliberate ideas and identities outside of the sociopolitical mainstream (Toepfl & Piwoni, 2015).
In this study, I approach review bombing as another political consumer practice, a kind of informal participation in everyday politics wherein people use consumer reviews and review systems to protest and punish companies and creators for perceived wrongdoing. More specifically, review bombing refers to the submission of a large number of negative online consumer reviews in a short enough span of time to cause a sudden, significant drop in a product's overall rating or review score. Review bombing has been lightly studied despite its prevalence in popular discourse since 2008 (Kuchera, 2008). Dutton et al. (2011) frame review bombing largely as an aspect of fandom's participatory culture, seeing it as another way that fans engage productively with and about texts. This somewhat rosy early criticism has been supplanted with more negative ones, perhaps as the practice has gained notoriety. Recent criticism, in addition to being few in number, assumes review bombing to be a social wrong in need of a productive solution to right it (e.g. Tomaselli et al., 2022; Stanfill and Salter, 2021). Such an approach takes for granted the disruption caused by review bombing, rather than questioning that disruption and attempting to situate it within larger discourses, ideals, and values related to consumerism, within which review bombing, as part of political consumerism, is inextricably twined. Critically, review bombing also hybridizes political practice and protest with audience labor (Andrejevic, 2008), as consumer reviews constitute acts of audience or fan labor in that they may be construed as user-generated content (Duffy, 2010; Hamilton, 2014).
In addition to these few studies of review bombing not critically engaging with how platforms respond to it, studies of political consumerism in the context of platforms tend to look more at how platform affordances help political consumerism and less at how these affordances—and the logics and discourses that sustain them—are constructed and governed by the companies that operate them. When faced with unrest among their users, whether this be the result of protest, trolling, or harassment, platforms actively engage in policing, both visible and invisible to their users. Despite being champions of sharing and connection, platforms often respond to apparent trouble by isolating and disconnecting (Gillespie, 2015), not only leading to confusion among users as to their status on a platform but also to users choosing to disengage or self-censor in order to protect themselves (Myers West, 2018). Platforms wield visibility in particular as both carrot and stick for their users, raising it and reducing it often through the inscrutability of opaque algorithms and policies (Zeng and Kaye, 2022; Duguay et al., 2020; Cotter, 2019).
Nevertheless, in practice platforms cannot act unilaterally on their users or even their own code, however much they may claim or wish to be able to. For major players like Google and Facebook, the threat of government regulation looms large; for all, they must contend with the reality of user acceptance and resistance. Meaning on and of platforms is co-constructed through the logics of participatory (Langlois, 2013) and algorithmic culture (Roberge and Seyfert, 2016), with platforms, users, and other stakeholders such as advertisers and regulators constraining the operation of platforms and the production of knowledge. Squabbles between platform operators and their users paint a picture of contested governance (Sybert, 2022), where decisions made by platforms have a certain precarity and liminality according to how users accept or reject them.
The question emerges then: what does this process look like when the platforms encounter political consumerism? Rather than asking how companies respond to being the targets of political consumerism, or how people engage in discrete practices of political consumerism, we must make visible the typically invisible mediator of these contentious practices because of their outsized, yet contested, influence over the processes by which many of us can engage in the informal participation of politics.
Steam as platform and economy
Launched in 2003 by Valve Corporation, Steam is part storefront for games and other products, part personal library for games, and part social networking site with moderated forums, personal messaging, and friend lists. The platform is part of a gaming industry for personal computers (PCs) that generated an estimated $40.3 billion in global revenue in 2023 (Batchelor, 2023). The PC gaming industry in turn exists within a larger gaming market for PCs, consoles, and mobile devices that generated an estimated $184 billion in global revenue in 2023. In 2023, Steam alone generated an estimated $8.6 billion in game sales revenue (Clement, 2024), roughly 21% of PC gaming revenue from that year.
While the Steam platform is considered the leading storefront for purchasing digital PC games based on user numbers and revenue alone, it has many competitors and ancillaries within an expanding landscape of digital storefronts for games. The video games industry at large continues to grow in economic and social importance, particularly as major technology and global media firms—such as Google (Amadeo, 2018), Amazon (Gilbert, 2019), Facebook (Dredge, 2014), and Tencent (Hinkle, 2013)—show a growing interest in exploiting it. Many digital game storefronts are operated by or were started by game development companies, and Valve Corporation itself has developed several games, launching the Steam platform in 2003 to help distribute them. Steam's competitors include Gamer's Gate, now an independent company but launched as a storefront by game publisher Paradox Interactive in 2006 (GlobeNewswire, 2006); CD Projekt Group, owner of the developer CD Projekt Red, which launched its Good Old Games (GOG) platform in 2008 (Makuch, 2014); and Epic Games, which launched its Epic Games Store (EGS) platform in 2018 (Frank, 2018). Each of these storefronts sells games produced by the developers that launched the stores as well as games from other developers. Many other game developers have their own digital storefronts (e.g. Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard, and Ubisoft), but these storefronts almost exclusively sell those developers’ games and no others. Other storefronts sell license keys that can only be redeemed on another platform (usually Steam), for example, Green Man Gaming, Fanatical, GameBillet, and Humble Bundle. Sites like IsThereAnyDeal.com exist to map prices across this landscape and alert users to sales. “Grey market” key sellers also exist, offering keys that may have been legitimately acquired, may belong to other global regions, or may have been illegitimately acquired, often through the use of stolen credit cards (Hall, 2015). Individuals also trade and sell directly to others their non-activated license keys, often going through a third-party website like Reddit's r/GameTrade community.
Befitting its political-economic significance not only within the video games industries but also within a wider economy of platforms, Steam has increasingly become a site for critical intervention by scholars into practices of governance and political-economic exploitation, among others. Aside from games sales, Steam serves as a platform for the increasing monetization of games (Zendle et al., 2020), which scholars have explored through the growth and regulation of “loot boxes” (Xiao and Henderson, 2024); the buying and trading of “skins” (Thorhauge and Nielsen, 2021); Steam's centrality to “gamblification,” an apparatus of habituation to gambling and exploitation (Zanescu et al., 2021); and the continued blurring of the boundary between work and play through incremental introductions of affordances (Joseph, 2021; Thorhauge, 2023). While users utilize Steam's affordances in communal expressions of meaning-making, such as by articulating genres through community tags (Arasu, 2023), Steam's affordances seem in place largely to utilize users, through the enticement of social engagement, to produce value for Steam and its contracted game sellers (Joseph, 2021). Indeed, Thorhauge (2023) situates Steam's user review system within this march of expansion for its business model, linking it to the exploitation of participatory culture and the cultivation of producers, people who in their use of a platform's affordances become producers for the platform.
Yet, Steam's user reviews may also serve as valuable spaces for the building of public spheres of micro-politics, as Werning (2019) argues for other Steam affordances. In their study of how players perceived gender and inclusivity in games, Kohlburn et al. (2023) argue methodologically that Steam reviews are a valid space for understanding current discourse on social issues. Steam's user reviews are therefore useful not only for taking the discursive pulse of one segment of society but also for foregrounding the otherwise backgrounded logics and practices that shape and constrain sociopolitical discourses on platforms. There are many economic gears turning within Steam, and Steam itself turns within a broader system of gears—as with many other platforms. User reviews represent a less obvious site of commodification, but an important one. Political consumerism, expressed through the practice of review bombing, reappropriates user reviews for protest, threatening to turn the affordance away from its originally intended value-generating purpose. Steam has found itself forced to respond, and just how it does so—and its implications for political consumerism and discourse—are analyzed and discussed in the remainder of this article.
Methodology: toward a platform governmentality
Directing our focus to platforms’ relationship with political consumerism, this study uses governmentality as an analytical lens in order to foreground the relational, distributed nature of government, including the government of platforms. Foucault (1991, 2007) developed the concept of governmentality to explain the role of the state and the problem of “governing” well. More generally, it is often summarized as “the conduct of conduct,” an art of guiding the behavior of populations over and around obstacles to some formulated common good. Although governmentality typically has been employed as a concept related to geopolitical states, there is no necessary conceptual tie to such cases. Governmentality studies have never been strangers to the roles that non-traditional stakeholders of societal power, like platforms, play in the government of populations (Dean, 2010), such as the role of digital platforms for perpetuating neoliberal governmentality in urban spaces (Törnberg and Uitermark, 2020) or for producing particular identities of useful, entrepreneurial citizens (Ju, 2022; Uysal, 2023). “Corporate governmentality” has been proposed to critically describe the increasingly pivotal role of corporations, especially platform businesses like Facebook and Google, in traditionally state-centric spheres of social, economic, and political life (Collier and Whitehead, 2023).
A governmentality lens provides a set of critically descriptive tools for understanding how platforms function. Analytically, governmentality is a “regime of practices” (Dean, 2010) directed toward the problem of managing the conduct of others—not coercing it, but guiding it toward a particular end, an end that supposedly benefits all but, ultimately, has complex and often liminal consequences for different groups within the governed and for the governors themselves. A fundamental quality of governmentality is that it is a relational conception of power, but not necessarily a balanced one. There are those with greater leverage over how a population is conducted, but the realization of a governmentality depends on the general obedience and self-discipline of the members of its population. In the case of platforms, there is an obvious disparity in power between those who can, for instance, implement and remove affordances at will and those who can choose to use, not use, or misuse those affordances. Even in this scenario, the governors of a platform may backtrack on decisions if the governed offer enough resistance.
Methodologically, governmentality foregrounds questions of power and the practicality of its application. Dean (2010) has laid out useful analytics of governmentality, describing four interrelated dimensions of governmentality, any of which can be used as entry points for orienting our analyses: visibilities, rationalities, identities, and techne. Typically, governmentalities identify problems to solve within and through these dimensions—in addition to the central, general problem of how best to govern. What is seen as a problem, how it is seen as a problem, and how it is countered as a problem all have bearing on how we as researchers can explain why we behave in certain ways, why we develop our social identities, why we privilege certain ways of knowing, and what options we have for making each of these things different.
A good tactic for governmentality studies, therefore, is to enter the research through these problems on their own terms, as it were. In the present study, I have taken up review bombing as a problem for the governmentality of Steam as a platform. Steam problematizes review bombing as a kind of misconduct, one it endeavors to correct to preserve itself and its users as well as consumer culture and capitalism more broadly. To understand this, I focus on the use of Steam's consumer review system as a techne for its platform governmentality. Dean (2010) defines “techne” to include the “means, mechanisms, procedures, instruments, tactics, techniques, technologies and vocabularies” by which “authority [is] constituted and rule accomplished” (42); they are the practical dimension to governmentality. In the following analysis, I show how the review system is composed, not only of reviews and the affordances for writing them, but also of policies, blog posts, graphics, and algorithms—and how this composition produces and erases particular visibilities (rewarded behaviors) and identities (helpful consumers) based on a rationality of depoliticized, atomized consumption. Review bombing provides an exercise for the platform governmentality of political consumerism, inviting a shoring-up of its discourses and apparatuses for the long term.
How we go about governmentality studies varies from project to project. I have relied on an approach to analyzing computer and phone apps known as the walkthrough method (Light et al., 2016; Nieborg et al., 2020). The practical application of the walkthrough approach entailed accessing the Steam platform as a person with a user account and a person without one, driven by the knowledge that Steam hides “off-topic” reviews—how the platform characterizes review bombing—from users without accounts. However, aside from this (quite critical) difference, logged-in and not logged-in users only vary significantly in that logged-in users can contribute to Steam's review system by writing reviews, reviewing and rewarding other reviews, discussing reviews, and receiving messages from Steam about reviewing games they own.
As a not logged-in user, I accessed Steam through an internet browser after an online database search for the platform. I familiarized myself with the main pages of the platform, clicking links and buttons as if I were browsing on a whim and as if I were searching for a particular game. I navigated to games that I knew would have alleged “off-topic” activity, scrolled to and through reviews for these games, manipulating search and filter features. As a logged-in user, I followed the same workflow, with the additional starting point of my “library” of games on Steam, where I was prompted to review a game for which I had a license to play. In each case, I tried to encounter Steam and its review system as how I imagined a user might (and how I myself have encountered it) as well as how I imagined Steam's developers intended, in part to help establish the “environment of expected use” (Light et al., 2016). I only stopped the flow of these encounters to document via text and screenshot not only what I did but also what I reasoned about these actions—for instance, trying to understand the strangely non-binary choice of rating a review as helpful, not helpful, or funny, and how I was supposed to determine the point at which a review's humor was more important for others to know about than its helpfulness.
I sought out policy documentation from Steam about their review system to better understand their governmental process. While Steam, like most platforms, is not entirely forthright in what it shares about its design and governance, the platform nevertheless published a short series of blog posts about how they grappled with the problem of reviews and review bombing. I also paid careful attention to their landing page for their review system, titled “Introducing Steam Reviews,” which reads like a tutorial for would-be helpful citizen-consumers through which Steam also makes clear their vision for consumer reviews about games. Furthermore, I included documentation directed at game developers and publishers on how to manage and respond to consumer reviews, including “off-topic” activity.
Analysis of the data proceeded by developing codes in line with the central concepts of governmentality outlined above, paying particular attention to aspects of problematization, techne, and identities, the latter of which emerging as an important element in the data as the analysis developed. As I discuss below, it became clear that Steam's approach to review bombing hinged on its establishment of “helpfulness/unhelpfulness” as an orientating opposition, informing how it problematized review bombing, characterized its users, and altered its affordances.
Analysis
The following sections take up the question of how platforms contend with political consumer practice by applying the lens of governmentality to the video game consumer platform Steam, its user review system, and how it has problematized the practice of review bombing. I use the case of Borderlands 2 and its review bombing on Steam in 2019 to analyze how political consumerism is governed, paying attention to how users encounter Steam's affordances and how these affordances have been strategically developed and re-developed in response to review bombing. This particular case serves as an exemplar because it is the first case of review bombing on Steam that was subjected to significant changes made by the platform for handling user reviews, including algorithmically identifying and filtering alleged instances of review bombing. Analysis of the platform affordances of Steam as well as its public statements about reviews and review bombing shows a larger discursive project in action to depoliticize not only reviews and games but consumerism and human experience at large.
Steam's user review system: encountering and writing reviews
Steam seeks helpful labor from its gaming audiences, which builds into its socializing, techno-commercial mechanisms (van Dijck and Poell, 2013). The value of reviews can be understood not only as a function of how many direct purchases they lead to but also as a technology for educating consumers, guiding them not only to purchase games but also to collectively produce more knowledge for the purchasing of other games. Steam does not have to provide its own reviews and recommendations, though it does provide recommended games based on the other games users own and play. Users largely teach themselves, not just by producing and consuming reviews but by interacting with the platform and socializing through it.
Aside from varying competitive decisions for selling games, Steam differs from other digital game stores in its user affordances. Indeed, Steam affords its users so many socially interactive features that it would be wrong to classify the platform as either just a digital storefront or just a social media site. Platforms’ identities, including how and by whom they are determined, guide regulatory responses and efficacy (Gillespie, 2010). For instance, other digital storefronts may have attributes of social networking sites without focusing on them: Amazon has user reviews, discussion boards, and shareable “wish lists” for products, but it focuses on facilitating the sale of commodities with fewer communal affordances (Chan et al., 2022). This commodified relationship creates a captive audience that can lead to addictive behaviors (Ramadan, 2021), encouraging continued “engagement” and allowing for the cultivation of further value from users. Similarly, social networking sites may have attributes of digital storefronts without focusing on them: Facebook maintains a marketplace where users can sell products to each other, but it focuses on creating (commodifiable) networks of information sharing and socializing, a similar business model to their Messenger's platform power (Nieborg and Helmond, 2019). While Steam's revenue may depend on selling games as much as selling its built-in audience, it also emphasizes features for creating social experiences among its users. Users may add one another as friends, message each other, play games together, engage on discussion boards, and publish photos and videos from the games they play. Indeed, buying games appears to be only a small part of the intended user experience on Steam.
But, to borrow from Dallas Smythe (1977), Steam users spend an awful lot of time learning about the products they can buy and how they should consume them. On discussion boards users post topics with titles such as, “is this game worth playing?” or “should I buy this game?” In these posts, a computer mouse icon next to a user's name signifies that they own (on Steam) the game they are discussing, giving additional context for judging their authority. Within systems of governmentality, indications of authority can be viewed as part of the techne of power (Dean, 2010). Such indications encourage members of a population to model their conduct along similar lines, or to draw knowledge about how they might model their conduct from these apparent authorities. Viewing a user's profile may also reveal the games they have played lately or the entirety of their game library. Steam also highlights users currently playing a game: a bright green border appears around the player's profile icon, their name appears in the same bright green, and hovering the mouse cursor over either reveals which game they are playing. Users can link games that are not sold on Steam to their library so that they may play the games “on” Steam and have access to its social affordances, though they are flagged as “non-Steam games” to other users. Each of these affordances builds into a larger sense of community and is largely part of a greater strategy by Steam to maintain engagement, exploiting participatory culture as its business model (Thorhauge, 2023).
All of these features of the Steam platform serve a dual purpose of encouraging socialization as well as consumption, making Steam more of a “social storefront” than anything else. On this social storefront, the network of possible actions that users might take appears largely decentered, a strategy that spreads user engagement across many different areas of community that have been developed over time as part of Steam's overarching business model strategies (Thorhauge, 2023). It is still a store, and Steam makes no effort to obfuscate this. But the action of purchasing is enmeshed within a network of interrelated social actions—playing, friending, discussing, reviewing, sharing—that creates a “political economy of Steam.” All of these techno-commercial mechanisms (Poell and van Dijck, 2015) afford specific behaviors to encourage endless engagement and, ideally, endless purchases. Users are not meant to encounter the Steam platform only when they seek to make a purchase. Rather, they are meant to live their gaming lives through the platform, to make purchase after purchase and to help others do the same. Effectively, this builds Steam into a platform of and for everyday life for millions of users around the world (Couldry and Mejias, 2019), which allows for greater data collection and capital cultivation by colonizing communities and rituals of play.
No other feature on Steam represents the intersection of the social and the economic like the user review system. In addition to offering users’ reviews of games, it affords discussion among other users, rating of the reviews themselves, and attention to what the reviewing users might currently be playing. Again, this builds into various means of Steam's users governing themselves by producing and promoting certain “visibilities” (Dean, 2010), or ways of seeing related to playing and buying and learning about both. Steam aggregates reviews to create an overall rating for each game that displays at the top of the game's store page, in search results, and on other websites through the Steam API. Users who post reviews become laborers in a chain of production, generating discourse about a game and value in the form of a rating. This continues to blur the boundary between work and play, one of several incremental affordances that have been added to Steam in order to gamify and commodify the energies and passions of participatory culture (Joseph, 2021; Thorhauge, 2023).
Steam made its user review system available beginning in 2013 (Mahardy, 2013), incorporating an existing system that allowed users to recommend a game to their friends (Steam, n.d.). To write a review for a game, a user must acquire it and link it to their Steam account. The game may be purchased from another store and only linked through their account, but reviews in this situation are excluded in the aggregate score for the game. A review consists of a “thumbs-up” or “thumbs-down” recommendation as well as a written component that may be a few characters or many paragraphs in length. Reviewers often write about games at great length, employing creativity, wit, and critical reflection while sometimes reproducing the characteristics of journalistic critiques. In this way, there is a sense of journalistic responsibility, like a watchdog role (Carey, 2002). Steam encourages negative reviews if users are “unhappy with the product, or don't believe that it is delivering on what it promises” (Steam, n.d.). Other users can then review these reviews regardless of whether they own the game, rating them helpful, unhelpful, or funny and bestowing awards (small, emoji-like badges purchased with “Steam Points” that accrue from purchasing games and receiving awards from your reviews). While these review ratings function as an additional call for engagement from users to produce more immediate value on the platform (Joseph, 2021), they also build into Steam's governmentality by allowing the community to take part in the production of useful consumer identities (e.g. Ju, 2022; Uysal, 2023). Helpful reviews move toward the top of all reviews and are more likely to be read and garner awards, which grant the recipient more Steam Points, which encourage further engagement with Steam's other value-producing affordances (Thorhauge, 2023).
Steam solicits reviews explicitly through prompts in the user's library and implicitly through the prominence given to reviews. When a user logs into Steam, they can choose to default to viewing their library of games or the main store page. Viewing a game from their library, users see suggestions to review their game as they scroll through an information window about their experience with the game: the achievements they have qualified for, digital trading cards they have collected through playing the game, news and activity related to the game, and a small section titled “My Review.” This section and title exist whether the user has left a review or not—a note of expectancy from Steam, anticipating the user's contribution as part of participatory culture logics (Langlois, 2013). If the user has already written a review, that review displays here, along with the number of “likes” and comments other users have given to the review. Interestingly, as stated above, this design choice does not reflect the experience users have when encountering others’ reviews: they have no option to “like” a review, but rather to rate it as helpful, unhelpful, or funny. This would seem to be a relic of a different design thought process and one in line with other social media platforms that trade in likes and shares. Liking a review implies more emotionally driven engagement, which does not match with the practical, helpful attitude toward writing and reading reviews that Steam wishes to cultivate.
When a user chooses to write a review from their library, a pop-up box appears after clicking that allows them to do so. They first must click a thumbs-up “yes” or thumbs-down “no” button, while be reminded yet again of their time spent playing the game. Steam then presents them with an open text box and minimal guidance. Steam tells the user, “Please describe what you liked or disliked about this product and whether you recommend it to others. Please remember to be polite and follow the Rules and Guidelines. A description is required to post your recommendation.” The text for “Rules and Guidelines” is highlighted as if it were a link, but clicking it elicits no response. Below the text box, the user chooses the review's visibility (public or friends only), whether to allow for comments, and whether they received the game for free. Visibility defaults to public, encouraging the user to automatically make their review available to all—for reading, for learning, for rating. The comments option, however, is off by default. There is a disconnect between what Steam asks for, what it enforces, and what users end up doing with the review system. Steam attempts to construct a discourse around reviews of appropriateness and propriety, right from its very own instructions using “please” and reminding users about being polite. However, there appears to be no form of review moderation beyond censoring certain swears and relying on other users to flag content, aligning with how other social media platforms have taken to moderating much of their content. Even the broken link to Steam's rules and guidelines implicitly reinforces this laissez-faire approach. Users themselves write a wide variety of reviews. For instance, some reviews will be hundreds of words long; others a series of check boxes or categorical ratings; others a textual meme; others a link to a YouTube video; others ASCII text art, where characters are arranged in rows and columns to produce the effect of an image. Each of these kinds of reviews may be rated as some of the most helpful reviews for a given game, and this undercuts Steam's stated intentions behind its review system for producing useful discourse.
The community-based flagging system is matched by the rating system for reviews, and though users produce many types of reviews, other users have some agency in determining which ones are most likely to be prominent. By appearing at the top of every game's store page and in search results, a game's aggregate review score is difficult to miss. Users are encouraged to produce reviews—specifically, “helpful” reviews. Helpful reviews are read and awarded, and of course, many are also simply helpful, although users also routinely rate reviews as “helpful” for simply being entertaining, for instance by incorporating memes and hardly referring to the game at all. Nevertheless, Steam has a vested interest in promoting helpful reviews, even if they are negative. Negative sales may lead to fewer sales of one game but boost the sales of another one recommended by reviewers or by Steam itself elsewhere on the game's page. Users’ recommendations, couched as argumentation in a review, benefit from a chain of evidence and logic that may lead to a purchase: this review is helpful to others, so it is likely helpful to us; the reviewer dislikes the game for these reasons; the reviewer recommends this or that game instead, for stated or implied reasons; we can learn more about that game by reading its reviews; and so on. This creates a cycle of user-produced value (Joseph, 2021) within a system set up ostensibly to promote talk about games. These affordances also set the conditions to make review bombing an effective disruption, as well as an irruption of public sphere politics into a space that is apparently separate from them—while being enmeshed with a business model (Thorhauge, 2023) and governance process that is anything but apolitical.
But the rules governing the production and consumption of user reviews are loose, arguably by necessity. When the object of constraint is discourse, it can be difficult to successfully constrain it without producing new and perhaps unexpected discourses (Bunn, 2015). Since 2015 Steam has endured several high-profile instances of review bombing, in which large numbers of negative reviews are generated for a game over a short span of time. Review bombing is an act of protest, committed by one or many users, in response to perceived wrongdoing related directly or indirectly to a game, such as the inclusion of racial diversity (Grayson, 2016) or an exclusivity deal with another store (Chalk, 2019). With the rise of review bombing, Steam's users were no longer only consumers and producers: they were also protesters.
In the remaining sections of this analysis, I walk through the process of learning about games through a case study of the review bombing of Borderlands 2, explaining how Steam responded to this new user identity and why they responded the way they did. Rather than a single, concrete response, Steam's changes were a process in which it grappled with both its users-turned-protesters and its position as a video game industry platform. By rearticulating its interface, user affordances, and discourse about reviews, Steam mitigated the effects of review bombing on the advertisement and sale of games while firmly depoliticizing reviews, their issues, and games as a whole.
A case study of
Borderlands 2
The case of Borderlands 2 serves as a focal point for understanding Steam's governmentality response, showing how the platform introduced new features alongside rearticulations of its discourse about reviews. These changes fit within a larger pattern of new and altered affordances that take advantage of participatory culture that it has developed throughout its history (Thorhauge, 2023). Steam made changes in phases, first by introducing histograms to allow their population to educate and police themselves (Dean, 2010). However, as review bombing took off—and leading into the case of Borderlands 2—Steam took a more interventionist approach to its governance processes, wielding visibility (Zeng and Kaye, 2022; Duguay et al., 2020; Cotter, 2019) as a weapon to blunt the effects of review bombing as a form of political consumerism. Alongside these changes to the “hard coding” of Steam, the platform also made “soft code” changes by appealing to nebulous concepts like accuracy, trustworthiness, and fairness without clearly defining them—a tactic that engages participatory culture (Langlois, 2013) and invites the population of Steam to police itself (Dean, 2010).
The case of Borderlands 2 is situated within the rivalry between Steam and the Epic Games Store (EGS). Launched in December 2018, EGS immediately sought to position itself as the more profitable option for publishers by offering to keep only 12% of sales revenue, compared to the 20–30% that Steam would keep (Statt, 2019; Fingas, 2018). EGS began courting the ire of consumers when they announced a series of exclusivity deals for future games, meaning that they would be available for personal computers only on EGS. For instance, in response to such a deal with Metro Exodus, thousands of Steam users began creating negative reviews for the other two games in the Metro franchise (Chalk, 2019). In their discourse, reviewers often argued that exclusivity deals constituted unfair consumer practices and would lead to fewer choices and higher prices for games. Fear of these outcomes drove the negative reviews in protest.
After the review bombings of the Metro games and others, Steam announced that it would alter its user review system. But the changes announced in March 2019 and put into effect in April, examined below, were not Steam's first attempt to address review bombing. Steam (Alden, 2017a) announced the first publicly-discussed response to review bombing in September 2017, which would be to include histograms of recent review activity to allow users to learn of spikes in negative or positive reviews (see Figure 2). This change came primarily in response to review bombing of the game Firewatch (England, 2017). In this way, Steam acknowledged consumers and positioned themselves as a moral leader of online discourse, mirroring political-economic institutions' drive for social power (Mosco, 2009). Aside from adding a histogram of review activity, Steam considered other options to address review bombing, including removing reviews determined to be part of review bombing, preventing all reviews from being published for a game for a certain period of time, or changing the calculation of the review score (Alden, 2017a). However, for the moment, Steam chose to make arguably the least interventive change that they admitted to considering. They changed nothing about the process of reviewing a game or calculating the aggregate rating for a game. They simply provided users with an additional information-gathering tool, ceding an opportunity for increased policing of their audience as consumers and producers and giving them an additional responsibility instead. This is a common facet of modern governmentality, producing new technologies and, with them, new visibilities with which members of a population can educate themselves and alter their conduct accordingly (Dean, 2010). The histogram of reviews for a game makes visible a pattern of user engagement, which other users are meant to decipher and draw implications from. While platforms regularly wield visibility through unexplained algorithms (Zeng and Kaye, 2022; Duguay et al., 2020; Cotter, 2019), here Steam produces a kind of pure visibility, relatively devoid of curation. At the same time, the effects of review bombing as a form of political consumerism not only remain but, in some ways, become amplified in this production of an additional visibility. With the addition of the histogram, not only does a game's review score and description change, but this change is also accompanied by another visual that draws attention to the temporal nature of the change—its suddenness, its sharp plunge.
But 18 months later, Steam changed its mind. On 1 April 2019 a video ad for Borderlands 3 leaked and featured the EGS logo in one of its corners. Its April Fools’ Day timing allowed for some skepticism over the leak, as game developers, publishers, storefronts, and fans often engage in April Fools’ pranks. Two days later, however, the substance of the leak was confirmed and detailed: Borderlands 3 would be an EGS exclusive for six months after its release (Singletary, 2019). Shortly thereafter, the review bombing of the Borderlands franchise on Steam began.
Steam users began to notice a change in the Steam interface and the way reviews were handled as early as April 5 (SteamDB, 2019; crocklist, 2019), though Steam does not make clear how much time passes between the onset of an increased volume of negative reviews and the deployment of their new response system. In a blog post announcing this new system, Steam confirmed that they had developed a way of “[identifying] any anomalous review activity on all games on Steam in as close to real-time as possible” but also relied on confirmation by Steam employees, implying some sort of hybrid algorithmic moderation process (TomB, 2019). The changes offered Steam employees no judgments about the activity beyond its “anomalous” nature, though we could argue that being flagged in the first place may introduce bias. The intended message is one of impartiality, wherein Steam plays the part of the neutral platform (Gillespie, 2010), reluctantly engaging in moderation of discourse by popular demand for the common good.
As to a definition of this “anomalous” activity, Steam equates this with “review bombs,” though they do not clarify if all “anomalous” activity constitutes review bombing. Steam offers the following definition for a review bomb: a review bomb is where [sic] players post a large number of reviews in a short period of time, aimed at lowering the Review Score of a game. We define an off-topic review bomb as one where the focus of those reviews is on a topic that we consider unrelated to the likelihood that future purchasers will be happy if they buy the game, and hence not something that should be added to the Review Score. (TomB, 2019)
For Borderlands 2, the clearest indication of Steam's changes was a bold white asterisk beside the “Recent Reviews” and “All Reviews” ratings at the top of the store page. Moving a mouse cursor over this asterisk reveals three bits of information: the percentage of positive reviews, a notification that “this product has experienced one or more periods of off-topic review activity,” and a notification of whether the reviews have been excluded based on the user's preferences (see Figure 1). This “preference” defaults to excluding “off-topic” review activity and applies not only to those who are logged-in to Steam but also to visitors who are not logged-in. Scrolling down past the game's description and recommended similar games, the user sees a similar bold white asterisk above a histogram of recent review activity (see Figure 2). After switching the preferences to include “off-topic” reviews (an option only available to those with a Steam account), the histogram and aggregate game rating change as reviews are reinstated. With Steam's response to the “off-topic” activity in place, the “Recent Reviews” rating for Borderlands 2 was “Very Positive” as of April 6, with 90% of 1106 reviews being positive. Changing preferences, the same rating decreased to “Mixed,” with only 49% of 5,230 reviews being positive.
“Off-topic review activity” disclaimer for Borderlands 2.
Histograms of positive and negative reviews for Borderlands 2. Bolded white areas signify “off-topic” review activity.
In other words, over 4,000 reviews had been excluded from the aggregation in a three-day timespan—or over 4,000 user accounts had had their act of protest silenced. Simply providing a histogram of recent activity was no longer enough to counter the effects of review bombing, it seemed. The effects that matter most to Steam are revealed by what their changes primarily target: the aggregate review score that sits at the top of each game's page and beside each game's search result. As I argue below, obfuscating the effects of political consumerism is a tactic in depoliticization. Steam engages in this tactic here to return user activity to the realm of production (Joseph, 2021) and play, sapping the potential strength of review bombing by making it less visible. This runs counter to Steam's 2017 assertion that “as a potential purchaser, it's easy to spot temporary distortions in the reviews, to investigate why that distortion occurred, and decide for yourself whether it's something you care about” (Alden, 2017a). But after repeated review bombings, Steam claimed to have listened to “both players and developers” when designing their new response: “It's clear to us that players value reviews highly, and want us to ensure they’re accurate and trustworthy. Developers understand that they’re valuable to players, but want to feel like they’re being treated fairly” (TomB, 2019). By altering the techne and visibilities of its review system (Dean, 2010), Steam engages in a governmentality of political consumerism that does not move to prevent the activity—review bombing—from occurring. Rather, Steam allows for a semblance of public sphere deliberation and everyday talk (Lundgaard and Etter, 2023) to occur, but it shunts it away from public view by default. This functions as a kind of side-stepping of the issue of political consumerism, likely as a way to avoid negative pushback from users and generating contested governance (Sybert, 2022).
But these concepts—accuracy, trustworthiness, fairness—how does Steam define them? They offer no direct definitions, though we can infer that each concept factors into the antithesis of what Valve considers to be review bombing: reviews focused “on a topic that we consider unrelated to the likelihood that future purchasers will be happy if they buy the game” (TomB, 2019). Steam feels that “the ‘general’ Steam player doesn't care as much about [the issues leading to review bombing], so the Review Score is more accurate if it doesn't contain them.” In 2017, Steam noted that “many of these out-of-game issues aren't very relevant when it comes to the value of the game itself, but some of them are real reasons why a player may be unhappy with their purchase” (Alden, 2017a). But with their 2019 changes, Steam asserted that these previously “real reasons” no longer mattered enough to justify the changes caused by review bombing to games’ ratings.
Perhaps disingenuously, Steam also equates review bombing with past instances of developers attempting to manipulate reviews: “It's the same reason that we decisively ban partners who engage in review manipulation—customers need to be able to trust the system for it be valuable” (TomB, 2019). In those cases, developers had been caught inappropriately flagging reviews for removal, attempting to compensate users for positive reviews, or goading employees to leave positive reviews. Should a disparity in power between developers on the one hand and a collection of users on the other matter here? Is there a disparity? When those who stand to profit directly from the reviews are the ones instigating the “manipulation,” this seems like a different quality of action entirely.
Depoliticizing reviews, consumerism, and experience
This method of handling review bombing affects the management of Steam's users as both producers and consumers and reflects a depoliticizing approach to political consumerism through digital media. Steam does not attempt to prevent the production of user reviews; in 2017, it considered and dismissed this option (Alden, 2017a). Instead, Steam differentiates acceptable conduct (labor) from unacceptable conduct (labor-cum-protest), negating the effects of the latter. In this way, Steam elides the role of protester with the construction of the unhelpful producer. Reviews in review bombings become “off-topic” activity, robbed of their disruptive attempts to generate deliberation about perceived issues, through this method of depoliticization.
Fawcett et al. (2017) paraphrase a succinct definition of “depoliticization” from Hay (2007): “the set of processes (including varied tactics, strategies, and tools) that remove or displace the potential for choice, collective agency, and deliberation around a particular political issue” (5). “Politicization” on the other hand functions as depoliticization's inverse, wherein issues “become the subject of deliberation, decision making and human agency where previously they did not” (Hay, 2007: 81). Issues move “inward” from the realm of necessity, or the non-political, through private, public, and governmental spheres as they are politicized, and “outward” as they are depoliticized. The public sphere is where actions like protest draw attention to issues, potentially but not necessarily seeking to politicize them further into governmental deliberation and action. Review bombing acts as a protest politicizing a perceived issue related to a game into Steam's public sphere for deliberation.
Steam's methods of depoliticization include rearticulation of review discourse and its interface and affordances for users, ultimately rearticulating games discourse as well. Discursively, Steam focuses on distinguishing helpful from unhelpful reviews (Alden, 2017b). Steam describes helpful reviews as follows (emphasis mine): Reviews should help paint a picture of what it's like to play the game and how well the game has been enjoyed by the people who have already played it. A good review typically describes some of the factors that directly impact the experience of playing the game, which can include a wide variety of things like how well the matchmaking works, how buggy the game is, or whether the game represents a good value for the price.
The changes made to Steam's interface further depoliticize reviews by pushing them and their issues back into a private sphere. Seeing the effects of review bombing becomes a personal choice, and by default the effects are hidden. Issues raised by review bombing are depoliticized, not by addressing them—as that would be deliberation—but by categorizing them as unhelpful. By providing explanations to its population as to why they are seeing bold white asterisks on a store page, Steam encourages its population to internalize definitions of off-topic and on-topic, unhelpful, and helpful review activity. Consequently, games themselves are depoliticized through the responsibility to recognize digital games as commodities whose value depends purely on entertainment value and consumption.
The “real reasons” mentioned above that had been acceptable for reviews in 2017 relate to issues such as business and labor practices, consumer rights, and other economic, social, and political issues. Following the series of review bombings in 2019, Steam now actively manages a depoliticized, digital-discursive public sphere in which none of these issues are appropriate when considering digital games as commodities. Through their efforts to manage and educate users, Steam hopes to enlist users in their own management. In doing so, digital games risk becoming even more dissociated from the real historical and material processes that factor into their conceptualization, production, dissemination, and consumption: if these are somehow judged to not affect a person's subjective experience of playing a game, they should by default not be taken into consideration when determining that game's value.
Conclusion
This study sought to understand the relationship platforms have to political consumerism and its practices. Using governmentality as an analytical lens, I have argued that Steam's user review system functions as a technology for managing and encouraging users’ conduct as consumers and producers. Steam problematizes review bombing as an obstacle to consumers’ fulfilling their role in the sale and circulation of games and knowledge about games. Review bombing, employed as a means of political consumerism, coopts what is otherwise a labor and value-producing practice. To overcome this problem, Steam has altered its affordances, interface, and policy discourse, not only seeking to mitigate the effects of review bombing on the advertisement and sale of games, but also attempting to further a rationality that disempowers consumer protest and depoliticizes reviews, consumerism, and everyday experience. Steam encourages its users to conduct themselves by edifying them as to what constitutes a “helpful” review and what actions they can take to promote such reviews for themselves and others.
With such a response from Steam, what does this mean for review bombing as a means of protest and for platforms as spaces for political consumer practice? Ettlinger (2018) argues that resistance practices such as protest in digital spaces can be productive: “Productive approaches to resistance … target and subvert a particular strategy of subjection to serve digital subjects” (2). Productive resistance works with and through platforms and algorithms, even as it might resist them: “digital subjects can construct spaces of resistance while also affecting other elements of the digital environment, … possibly digital governance overall.” Review bombing depends on the productive use of platform governmentality—the user review system, managing production and consumption—to construct a new space, indeed a new technology of power. In harnessing reviews for political consumerism, Steam users produce a new identity for themselves (protester) that overlaps with their identities as producers and consumers. However, users, as the governed, only have so much power in their relationship with platforms. For review bombing, Steam has adjusted the affordances of its platform to soften the blow to its business, as social media tend to do (Poell and van Dijck, 2015). Platform governmentality, in this case, has been an exercise in the re-articulation and shoring-up of its techne, identities, rationalities, and visibilities (Dean, 2010) to meet the changing demands of a restive population, absorbing the potential power of resistance and reconstructing it (back) into a productive commodity.
In the process of engaging in this project of governmentality, Steam has sought to depoliticize an inherently political space—the space of consumption—while not banning the practice of political consumerism entirely. What does this do within the larger context of a society that finds itself increasingly polarized, in no small part due to the algorithms and policies of platforms? Political consumerism scholars have begun to take up this question. Liaukonytė et al. (2022) have shown that partisanship extends to what we buy and consume, including how we participate in political consumerism, which Lelkes (2022) argues is contributing to a “tear in the American social fabric,” where we not only inhabit different political realities but different consumer-cultural realities as well. Stolle and Huissoud (2019), while calling for additional work to address the ways in which political consumerism is employed to promote undemocratic or illiberal ends like discrimination, argue that research design in the discipline of political consumerism research has led to producing data that favors studying the “democratic” side: “the result is an image of political consumerism that does not really speak to all its facets and variants” (637). In this study, using a governmentality lens in conjunction with established literature on political consumerism suggests an understanding not based on democratic and undemocratic, liberal and illiberal, or even, in the language of partisanship, left and right, progressive and conservative. Rather, in closing, I want to suggest that we try to understand political consumerism and the actions of platforms in society through a power-oriented perspective rather than a “simply” ideological one. Ideologies can change, can be adapted, can have their components selectively championed and excised as necessary for the good of the governmentality within which they are employed. Understood as a problem as well as a feature of platform governmentality, perhaps we should ask, how do those engaged in political consumerism conceive of the relations of power that frame their practices and discourses? And how do platforms conceive of such relations, their own actions, their own discourses? When these two views are not adequately articulated together, we may be producing sociopolitical frustrations that have more to do with the structure of power—and its forceful, perhaps violent reorientation—than any neatly, comfortably drawn understanding of contemporary partisanship and polarization.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.