Fake Reviews: Crossing the Line and Who Is Responsible
This week AmazonUK reported it has deleted 20,000 product reviews posted by individual reviewers who apparently were posting positive reviews in order to collect free products from the manufacturers. With online commerce exploding in recent years, every product and every service business craves five-star reviews. But can they encourage others to post good reviews – or is that misconduct?
Everyone knows that the local restaurant owner or plumber asks his or her best customers to post a “positive review” on Yelp or other platform. When does that encouragement become misrepresentation? And when reviews are falsified, who is responsible for uncovering and preventing it? Is Yelp or Amazon responsible? Are the makers of products touted in fake reviews responsible?
In the recent case, AmazonUK acted only after the Financial Times uncovered evidence that a small group of reviewers were offering to post positive reviews in exchange for free products, or were solicited by the manufacturers with offers of free products. The reviewers could then turn around and sell the free products on eBay or other website. FT found that nine of Amazon UK’s ten most frequent reviewers were engaged in suspicious practices, mostly on behalf of Chinese products. AmazonUK removed the reviews of seven of them on its UK website. Several other frequent reviewers removed their own reviews and fled the site.
Here are a few principles to use to determine when there is misconduct. First, are the reviewers actual purchasers of the product or service? If not, then their reviews should not be encouraged or accepted. Second, are the reviewers being paid for good reviews in some form, including by free products or other means? If so, the behavior is misconduct. These two principles still leave lots of room for ambiguity.
I know any local service provider has friends who want to help by posting five-star ratings. But I had a service provider ask me if I was completely satisfied with his service (“Does my service rate five stars; if not, tell me right now so I can fix it and warrant five stars.’ The savvy reader of reviews discounts a certain amount for that reality. I ignore any rating until there are more than 50 reviews. The landscaper cannot have that many good friends!
And what is the platform’s responsibility for fake reviews? First, if possible, the platform should have a way of verifying that the reviewer is a genuine purchaser. Second, it should be watchful for patterns such as seen with AmazonUK’s top reviewers – too many five-star ratings for too many products. It is an embarrassment for AmazonUK that FT discovered it first. And platforms should not deliberately or inadvertently create incentives for fake reviews, something AmazonUK was accused of due to its “vine” review program, by which reviewers were given free products in exchange for becoming ‘regular’ reviewers.
Relevant article:
Amazon deletes 20,000 reviews after evidence of profits for posts