What are the premises on fake reviews?
Fact 1: Many people validate their buying decisions by searching online reviews for the product they are interested in.
Fact 2: Some e-commerce retailers provide fake reviews for their products.
Fact 3: Amazon announced it is currently suing over 1000 people whose activity consisted in offering custom product reviews via the Fiverr.com platform. Earlier this year, in April, the same online retailer sued certain websites that offered the same kind of service – writing paid product reviews.
What lies behind this decision and why does an online retailer feels compelled to take action against such a practice – here is an interesting question.
Fake reviews and Web ethics
Although the web is a place of anonymity and endless identity shape-shifting, it is also a virtual space that strives to maintain its credibility and ethics. Companies present online their real products and services, which, when purchased, arrive in their material form to the buyers – and misrepresentation is not an ethical practice.
Genuine customers find out about a product/service, research it on the net, weigh their options and reach a decision. That decision is confronted with the reality, and a satisfied buyer matches his/her expectations with the object of the purchase. Such a customer is likely to remember the brand, the virtual steps that encouraged his decision, and will come back for another purchase or even recommend the entire experience to others.
On the other side, a disgruntled customer will perceive this entire dynamics as being disrupted and try to identify the deceiving element in order to avoid it. Whether such a customer criticizes, boycotts or makes noise about his unpleasant experience, it is nevertheless bad for the object of his/hers discontent.
A 2012 Forbes article approached the issue of fake reviews – both positive and negative, using the opportunity provided by an insider’s experience (an author who used many pseudonymous accounts to promote his book). Unsurprisingly, Amazon was the concerned online retailer featured by the Forbes article. Another targeted platform that is repeatedly linked to this particular issue is TripAdvisor.
Using fake reviews is considered against Internet best practices.
E-commerce and fake reviews
Also named “opinion spamming”, the phenomenon of posting positive opinions for some products/services, and/or posting negative reviews to the competition’s products/services has triggered criticism in the past from more renowned publications.
NY Times closely studied the patterns of this online behavior, in collaboration with specialists. The Federal Trade Commission also disapproved these practices – as you may see in the NY Times article. Academic research aiming to detect the fake reviews was sponsored by big tech companies, in the overall interest of re-establishing a balance in the online environment. Such unethical practices are perceived as disrupting because they confuse customers, as well as web algorithms.
A nodal point for this concern and its associated research is accessible on the site of University of Illinois (Chicago), Department of Computer Science – more precisely via Professor Bing Liu’s projects. The summary of this work, partially funded by National Science Foundation, Microsoft, and Google, is called “Opinion Spam Detection: Detecting Fake Reviews and Reviewers” and it provides a great and thoroughly read on the subject and a very useful link collection.
Without going further into details, e-commerce does not benefit from fake reviews. Employing shilling is deemed as dishonoring for the brands that are connected to it. These methods of manipulating the customers’ opinion put a shadow on the involved commercial entities and have progressively lead to actions such as Amazon suing the entities behind them.
How do fake reviews work?
Amazon conducted its own investigation on the Fiverr users that offered their paid services of writing fake reviews – and found that most of the reviews were positive ones. Nevertheless, they were fake and that violated the company’s guidelines – an infringement perfected to such an extent that in some instances the reviewer received an empty envelop just to create a shipping record.
There are opinions that a review is fake just by being produced by a person that did not have the intention or need to purchase the reviewed product – because only a real customer or a trained tester might know what to consider in a product under scrutiny.
Fake reviews are also used in order to cover up genuine reviews that do not agree with the producer/brand. By ranking higher and posting more often than real customers, paid reviewers make it difficult to access the real customers’ comments. Instead of taking the time and the courtesy to reply to negative feedback using a strategy in view of that, some companies simply acquire paid reviewers’ services to compensate the more critical opinions, or simply take down the unwanted feedback – although the users might voice their discontent about comment deletion.
This practice of using paid reviews boosts the rankings, misrepresents the products, covers unwanted genuine reviews and disrupts analytic algorithms.
The public’s reaction to opinion spamming
Customers often risk being underestimated – when in fact people are gradually becoming more and more tech-savy. There are numerous Web articles on how to spot fake reviews – and they are mostly destined for the potential customers – which thus become aware of the problem they need to avoid, in a very rigorous manner. Of course, as a customer, one may develop such instincts independently, but nevertheless sometimes the fake elements are so sophisticated that they might fool the best of us.
The common guidelines in spotting fake reviews feature the over usage of personal pronouns, the superlative, emotional descriptions (positive or negative), the short length of the review, the vagueness, the singular/big number of reviews coming from the same source (for different products, as well), the extreme ratings (highest or lowest) or the strange use of figurative language. Of course, the less sophisticated attempts usually are recognizable by their copy-paste style that is generally considered a red flag.
The industry’s reaction to fake reviews
Perhaps the most drastic reaction is the one we are just witnessing – launching a lawsuit.
Prior to this, all online platforms that already have (or are building) a reputation establish guidelines that ban fake reviews, and sometimes also detail what they understand to be such false opinions, just to make things clear.
When identified, such reviews are removed. Amazon in particular considers user reviews as a powerful tool – and tries to keep it helpful for shoppers. In order to be able to do this, it uses artificial intelligence – as an article from June 2015 details. Using automation to combat “astroturfing” (as the fake campaigns have been named) is a practice in which other important sites have been employing.
