TripAdvisor has announced that a new system of anti-fraud tactics have been put in place in order to eliminate fraudulent reviews. The travel site’s measures to maintain content integrity are modeled after the kinds of anti-fraud techniques most often implemented by companies in the finance industry.
Their latest algorithm changes are designed to check each review made–every minute of the day. Those reviews that are obviously authentic are published, often within 24 hours. Those that are clearly not, are immediately discarded and the businesses behind them are now marked with a Red Badge that appears on their profile alerting users and customers with a warning that states not all reviews on their page are necessarily “genuine.”
The reviews that are filtered as “questionable,” are the ones that pose a more challenging problem and require more care and attention in order to weed out, explains Andrew Marane, who was once an ecommerce fraud investigator and is now the man in charge of spearheading the effort to keep the travel site’s reviews as trustworthy as possible.
People put faith in online reviews. But, as we’ve discussed before, this trust is a privilege that must be continually earned, not a right. It takes a number of genuine, positive reviews and ratings from real satisfied customers to grow your business, not disingenuous ones forged by an underhanded marketing company or a desperate business owner. More and more people are concerned with the authenticity of these reviews they’ve grown to trust.
According to a recent report by Gartner released at the end of last year, roughly 10-15 percent of social media reviews, likes, and more are estimated to be fake by the year 2014. The prediction, and fear, that reviews may not be people’s actual opinions but instead paid for by companies themselves, is a scary one.
That’s why popular review platforms like TripAdvisor are working harder than ever to put systems in place to assuage those fears and safeguard against fake reviews. With their new crack down against paid and fraudulent reviews, TripAdvisor hopes to maintain the trust with their users that their business is founded on.
