To mitigate the widespread crisis communication of brand negative publicity on social media, many brands have applied comment management strategies (such as managing featured reviews) to moderate unfavorable reviews. Drawing from the Persuasion Knowledge Model, this paper conducts three experiments with Weibo users to examine the impact of featured review set characteristics (balance, sequence, and type) on consumers’ crisis communication. The results show that a fully positive set of featured reviews or presenting positive comments earlier in a sequence stimulates stronger inferences of ulterior motives, further trggering secondary crisis communication. Furthermore, defensive featured reviews (as opposed to advocative reviews) lead to stronger inferences of ulterior motive in the negative-positive sequence, while the effect is not significant in the positive-negative sequence. Theoretically, this research observes the counterproductive effect of featured reviews and provides new directions for social media crisis response strategies. In addition, this paper has practical insights for companies to apply comment management strategies in response to negative publicity.