Slashdot Mirror
TripAdvisor Fined In Italy For Fake Reviews
mpicpp writes with news that TripAdvisor, a travel website filled with user-generated reviews, has been hit with a €500,000 ($611,000) fine for "misleading customers" by failing to cull fake reviews from their list. "The regulator complained that people reading TripAdvisor Italy were unable to distinguish between genuine and fake reviews posted on the site. It said both were presented by TripAdvisor as 'authentic and genuine in nature.' Demanding payment of the fine within 30 days, the ICA also accused the travel company of failing to provide proper checks to weed out bogus postings."
Very nice post. I enjoyed every part of it. Everything was top notch clean, the personnel was courteous. I highly recommend this post to everybody.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Either that or get the content up to the promised accuracy (that seems impossible though).
No it's not. It's called "secret shopper", a.k.a -- the company pays for their own content by hiring a reviewer who does not tell the establishment he is there to professionally review them and instead poses as a regular customer so he gets no special treatment.
But in an ever repeating cycle, companies today want to crowdsource (get for free) the content that drives people to visit them. Low investment = low quality. Much like news outlets' quality goes down as they start using user submissions, tips and rumors from social networking, and amateur visuals because they dont' want to pay for professional journalists and cameramen.
The regulator complained that people reading TripAdvisor Italy were unable to distinguish between genuine and fake reviews posted on the site.
So how is TripAdvisor supposed to do it?
By stopping advertising that every reviews are genuine. The complaint is about false advertisment (the review on our site are all genuine and verified), not about fake review. http://www.agcm.it/stampa/comu... :
In particolare, TripAdvisor pubblicizza la propria attività mediante claim commerciali che, in maniera particolarmente assertiva, enfatizzano il carattere autentico e genuino delle recensioni, inducendo così i consumatori a ritenere che le informazioni siano sempre attendibili in quanto espressione di reali esperienze turistiche.
Two restaurants I really liked in Berlin, I talked to the owners about TripAdvisor:
Neither was listed. I wanted to add them and tell others about how nice they were.
They asked that I didn't put them (back) on TripAdvisor. Apparently people use sites like that to blackmail restaurants into service.
That's why we can't have anything nice.
Either TripAdvisor owns up and starts cleaning up false reviews, or it will get completely useless.
Maybe the "star" rating system needs to go, and only allow reviews. Rate restaurants on how well-written the reviews are, and people can read for themselves. It should make it a lot more work to actually sink a restaurant.