First heard on the net in 2020. Retold in Rijeka in 2023. Brought to bonfires in Berlin and Orléans 2024.
In January 2020, school students in the city of Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in China and the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic, were the first in the world to experience virtual teaching. The Alibaba Group-owned corporate app DingTalk started to be used by teachers to set homework and monitor the virtual classroom attendance of quarantined students. After Wuhan, this expanded all across China’s estimated 50 million school students.
Soon, word spread that there was a way to resist this. Tens of thousands of students logged in to give the app negative user reviews—“review-bombing it”—in the hope that it will be removed from app stores. For a time, the rating of DingTalk plummeted from 4.9 to 1.4 stars, and the app had to beg for mercy by uploading an apology video on the Chinese streaming site Bilibili.