Summary

Cyberbullying targeting brands increased by 205% in France in 2025, according to Cybermalveillance.gouv.fr. This is no longer a marginal risk, but a fully-fledged operational threat, ranging from coordinated digital raids to deepfakes, review bombing, and brand identity theft. Companies that weather these crises without lasting damage share three characteristics: they built a solid online reputation before any attack occurred, they have a response protocol that can be activated within 24 hours, and they treat each incident as a trust-building opportunity rather than a humiliation to be suppressed.

Brand Cyberbullying Has Changed Its Face: Mapping New Forms of Attack

Equating brand cyberbullying with a few negative Google reviews is a radical underestimation of the reality in 2026. In the professional sphere, coordinated campaigns of intimidation, insults, or fraudulent negative reviews can seriously damage the reputation of organisations that are often ill-equipped to respond, from artisans to non-profits. Yet attack methods have become considerably more industrialised and diversified, to the point that analysts at Cybermalveillance.gouv.fr describe these coordinated campaigns as “digital terrorism that activates a range of different cyber threats to harm the organisation.”

Digital Raids and Review Bombing: The Crowd as a Weapon

A digital raid (or “review bombing”) involves mobilising a community (often around an emotional trigger) to flood a company’s review platforms with negative ratings en masse and within a very short timeframe. Suffering a review bombing has immediate consequences on brand image, but the impact can go far beyond a temporary drop in an online rating. If not managed quickly, such a crisis undermines the trust of existing customers and severely hampers the acquisition of new prospects. The case of the bakery in Oise in 2025 perfectly illustrates the disproportion between trigger and consequence: a TikTok content creator aggressively accused the bakery on camera of getting her order wrong, triggering a torrent of devastating reviews. This type of attack draws its power from the emotional virality of social platforms: the algorithm amplifies controversial content, and the brand finds itself fighting not only the harassers but also the intrinsic mechanics of social media.