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Anyone can be a product expert or a restaurant reviewer on sites like Amazon and Yelp. But an individual pays the ultimate price for a fake "expertise" on a popular travel site.
according to Skift, an owner of a company that sold fake comment packages to hotels was sentenced to a nine months of imprisonment in June, for hundreds of messages with a false identity on TripAdvisor – home to more than 600 millionimpartial"Traveler Reviews.
As of 2015, TripAdvisor has identified fake reviews under several account names created by a company called PromoSalento. According to his websiteThe company is a visual advertising and marketing company based in Lecce, Italy. But according to Skift, his advertising efforts included a pay fraud, where compensation for positive reviews of restaurants and hotels is received. TripAdvisor has followed the Italian company and its owner, blocking or removing more than 1,000 fraudulent scams from the site and job with the forces of order to conduct an investigation.
"TripAdvisor has supported the pursuit of PromoSalento as a civil plaintiff by sharing evidence of its extensive internal fraud investigations and by providing support from its Italian legal counsel," TripAdvisor said in a statement. declaration. "Revision fraud is something that TripAdvisor takes very seriously, using advanced tracking technology and a dedicated team of investigators to detect paid review firms and prevent them from running on the site."
In addition to imprisonment, the owner of PromoSalento will also pay about 8,000 euros, or about $ 9,310, in costs and damages, as ordered by an Italian court. "We see this as a landmark decision for the Internet," said Brad Young, vice president and associate legal counsel for TripAdvisor. declaration. "Writing false reviews has always been a fraud, but it's the first time we see someone jailed."
The legislation on false opinions is stricter in the EU
In 2005, the European Union adopted legislation known as the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, obliging companies to false advertising. According to Shannon Wilkinson, CEO of Reputation Communications, the rules in the United States governing fake journals, however, are much lenient. In 1996, the United States introduced the Communications Decency Act, which releases website owners from liability for what is posted on them.
And TripAdvisor It's not the only review site with a number of false reviews. In 2014, a Virginia court governed An examination by a Yelp star by a woman who alleged that a local contractor had damaged her house was considered defamation. And according to a 2017 report by NBC Los Angeles, one in four reviews on Yelp is fake, biased or considered by the review site as cunning and irrelevant. Amazon even sued over 1000 vendors on false reviews, according to NPR, although the problem is again crawling – and maybe worst than ever.
How to spot a false opinion
Given the number of false reviews on sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor, how do you know what to trust? Wilkinson said that there are many ways to separate the real from the fake. For example, beware of a profile with no photo, no name or little history of the magazine, she added, adding that false reviews are often written by accounts business.
She also said to be cautious with rave reviews, or extremely negative ones, that can be false, or at least skewed. According to the TripAdvisor site websiteWhile the business of positive criticism is alive and well, the opposite is also true, with many critics discrediting companies intentionally. "Most of the biased negative reviews come from one of two sources – either from someone connected to a competing establishment or from someone who is trying to blackmail a company by threatening to submit a false negative evaluation. "
In June, a restaurant received a massively a wave of one and five star polarizing reviews on Yelp after Sarah Huckabee Sanders, press secretary, was invited to leave by her owner. The page quickly became a political battlefield among supporters and critics, forcing Yelp to deploy an "active cleaning alert" on the restaurant page, thus blocking the page of several critics. "Even if we do not take a position when it comes to these news, we strive to remove the positive and negative messages that seem to be more motivated by media coverage than the reader's personal experience of the company." , the alert on Yelp read.
For any assessment, positive or negative, it is better to be cautious, Wilkinson added. A recent study We found that 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, and that 49% of consumers do not even use a business without at least four stars.
"Anyone can become a critic," said Wilkinson. "There is little or no verification. Like Facebook and Twitter, or any online dating site, it is very easy to set up a fake profile, and dissatisfied customers are more likely to post a notice than a customer. satisfied. We, the consumers, do our best to eliminate the fake ones. No one has really thought about the false news, nor about all the problems that so many platforms face – and we are there.
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