"Reverse Recommendation" Phenomenon on Social Media of Generation Z

Abstract

In the current era of profound transformation in the digital marketing ecosystem, Generation Z, as the native generation who grew up with social media, is undergoing a structural reshaping of their consumption decision-making logic. This study examines the "reverse recommendation" phenomenon on social media among Generation Z, employing a mixed research method combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. It was found that 78.26% of the respondents trusted the real evaluations of ordinary users, while only 9.78% recognized the official brand promotions. The credibility gap was 8 times. At the same time, by crawling 1,266 high-vote comments containing keywords such as "recommendation" and "avoiding risks" on Red Star and Bilibili, using word segmentation and sentiment analysis, the frequent negative words such as "severe oxidation" were identified. It was traced that a single negative review, through the path of "like - comment - topic tags", spread to an influence range more than 10 times larger than the controllable channels of the brand. The research shows that 69.57% of users actively check the content related to product removal, and 52.17% refuse to purchase products with excessive marketing. Among the users who are disgusted by "unmarked soft advertising" and "frequent push notifications", 27.2% have taken measures to block and their satisfaction levels have declined by 76.5%. The research suggests that brands should establish transparent communication mechanisms and optimize user experience, while platforms should strengthen advertising labeling and limit the frequency of push notifications, providing a way to solve the trust crisis.