Effect of Toxic Review Content on Overall Product Sentiment

TL;DR

This study investigates how toxic review content affects overall product sentiment, revealing that toxicity negatively impacts perceptions but does not mediate reviewer scores across sectors.

Contribution

It provides a quantitative analysis of toxic content's influence on product sentiment using structural equation modeling on a diverse review dataset.

Findings

Toxic reviews negatively affect overall product sentiment.

Toxicity does not mediate reviewer scores in sector-wise ratings.

Study uses a balanced dataset from 18 providers across three sectors.

Abstract

Toxic contents in online product review are a common phenomenon. A content is perceived to be toxic when it is rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable and make individuals leave the discussion. Machine learning algorithms helps the sell side community to identify such toxic patterns and eventually moderate such inputs. Yet, the extant literature provides fewer information about the sentiment of a prospective consumer on the perception of a product after being exposed to such toxic review content. In this study, we collect a balanced data set of review comments from 18 different players segregated into three different sectors from google play-store. Then we calculate the sentence-level sentiment and toxicity score of individual review content. Finally, we use structural equation modelling to quantitatively study the influence of toxic content on overall product sentiment. We observe that comment toxicity negatively influences overall product sentiment but do not exhibit a mediating effect over reviewer score to influence sector-wise relative rating.